Introduction

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If you're listening to this, there's a pretty good chance you've already been on Zillow this week, maybe today, maybe in the last hour. And you've probably already done the thing every first-time home buyer does. You found a house you love, you punched the price into a mortgage calculator on some random website, and the number it spit out either made you really excited or made you close the app immediately. Here's what I want you to know before we get into anything else. That number is wrong. Not kind of wrong, wrong, wrong. And the reason it's wrong is the reason this entire podcast exists. You're trying to make the biggest financial decision of your life with information that was written for everybody and honestly, it applies to nobody. So today I'm going to fix that. Welcome to FDHB Pros Podcast. I'm Dat D A T like who dat or just like Dat. Easy to remember, right? I'm a certified mortgage advisor and I spent the better part of a decade in lending. I work with first-time home buyers pretty much every single day, and I've sat across the table from enough real estate agents, escrow officers, and title reps to know exactly how all of these pieces fit together. That matters because in this business, knowing what everyone else is doing is the difference between a smooth close and a deal that falls apart. This show exists because the more you understand what's actually happening, the less stressful the whole thing is. And I've seen what stress does to buyers. It makes them rush, it makes them overpay, and sometimes it makes them walk away from a house they should have bought. Quick note on who this show is for. If you're someone who wants to actually understand what's happening, not just be told what to do, not just trust the process, you're in the right

The very first step: you need to find a lender

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place. If you want service level tips and feel good cheerleading, there are a hundred other shows for that. This one is for buyers who want to be the smartest person in their own deal. So today in episode one, and we're keeping it big picture here, I'm walking you through the entire process, from before you ever talk to a lender all the way to the day you get your keys. We're not going deep on rules and exceptions today. We have a whole catalog of future episodes for that. Today is about the flow, the shape of it. So when you're in it, nothing feels like a surprise. And just so you know what's coming, over the next several episodes, we're going deep on every single one of these steps. How to actually find the right lender, what pre-approval really looks like behind the scenes, how to write an offer that wins in a tight market, what underwriting is really asking for and why, how to know if you're getting a bad deal on rate. If any of that sounds useful, follow the show. You won't want to miss it. Okay, now that we have those out of the way, let's

Get Pre-Approved

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walk the actual process. The work that pays you back later. Most episodes about home buying start at step one. Find a lender. I'm going to back up further than that because there's a window before you ever pick up the phone where you can give yourself a massive advantage, or you can ignore it and then we're scrambling later. Three things to handle before that first call. One, know where your credit actually stands. What I want you to actually do is pull your credit report from annual creditreport.com. That one's free, that one's official, and the report itself is what matters more than the score. You're looking for surprises, old collections you forgot about, mistakes, identity theft, accounts that aren't yours, those things take weeks to dispute and can absolutely sink alone. 2. Understand the real money you need to bring. Down payment is not the only check you're going to write. Most first-time homebuyers don't realize how much sits behind that one number. You also need closing costs, usually 2-5% of the purchase price. You need a few months of reserves in some loan programs. You need money for things like inspection and appraisal. And then the day after closing, you need money for moving, utilities turning on, furniture you don't have yet, and the random thing in the house that breaks in week one. There is always a thing in week one, trust me. This isn't to scare you. It's so you walk in knowing the real number, not the Zillow number. 3. Stop doing certain things right now. This is the one no one tells you about, and it's the most important. Once you start the home

Find a Realtor

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buying process, your financial life goes under a microscope. So a few things to stop doing as of today. Don't change jobs if you can't avoid it. Don't quit and start something self-employed. Don't co-sign anything for anybody. Don't finance a car. Don't open new credit cards because you're trying to build credit fast. Don't make large deposits into your account that you can't easily document. Gifts from family included because those have rules and don't move money around between accounts more than you need to. Every single one of those things creates questions in underwriting. Some of them can outright kill the loan. The cleaner your financial picture stays from this moment forward, the smoother every step after this is going to be. Okay, now we can start the actual process. Step one. The mistake almost everyone makes. Most first-time homebuyers think the order goes find a house, then figure out the money, that's backwards. And it's backwards for a reason most people don't realize until it's too late. Until a lender has actually looked at your numbers like your income, your credit, your savings, your debts, you don't know what you can actually buy. You may think you do because the online tools or ChatGPT told you, but none

Go shopping

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of these numbers are real. Your lender turns the abstract into the actual, that's their job. So how do you find one though? The best lenders aren't found through ads, they're found through referrals. If you already know a real estate agent, ask them. Good agents have worked with a lot of lenders and

Make an offer

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they remember the ones that answer the phone at 7 p.m. on a Sunday, and they remember the ones who blew up a deal. They'll definitely tell you. If you don't have an agent yet, ask people who recently bought. Don't just ask who did you use. I always like to ask, would you use them again? And here is something I want you to hear me on. Rate isn't everything. A quarter point savings doesn't matter if your lender is horrible at communicating or if you have a difficult time getting a hold of them, especially in the evening or weekend, and you lose the house. Communication is the product, the rate is the price. What you're looking for is you want someone who teaches, not someone who sells. If your first call with the lender feels like a pitch, that's your answer. If it feels like a conversation, they're asking questions, they're explaining trade-offs, they're not rushing you, I would say that's your person. So let's go into step two, what pre-approval actually is. Pre-approval isn't a letter. The letter is the receipt. The pre-approval itself is a financial conversation, a real honest one, about what you make, what you owe, what you've saved, and what kind of monthly payment your life can actually handle. And here's the part that catches people off guard. The maximum you qualify for and the maximum you should spend are two different numbers. The bank's job is to ask, can you make the payment? My job is to ask, do you want to make this payment for the next 30 years? Big difference. So what you provide are pay subs from the last 30 days, W-2s from the last two years, bank statements, usually two months, if you're self-employed, two years of tax returns, ID, and you'll authorize a credit pool. Now, let me repeat myself, here's something that's changed recently, and most buyers don't know about it yet. A lot of lenders, including us, can now do a soft credit pool for your initial pre-approval. That means no hit to your credit score at the start. The hard pool doesn't happen until you're under contract and ready to move forward on a specific home. So if you've been hesitating to even start the conversation because you didn't want to ding your credit, that's no longer a real reason. Ask your lender if they offer a soft pool pre-approval, and if they don't, ask them why. And when the hard pool does eventually happen, here's another thing most people don't know. You can shop multiple lenders within a 30-day window, and it counts as one inquiry for scoring purposes. So don't be scared to get a second opinion. So what you're going to walk away with is you'll walk away with three things a maximum purchase price, an estimated monthly payment that includes taxes and insurance and any HOA, not just principal and interest, and a pre-approval letter your agent can attach to offers. And one thing most first-time homebuyers don't realize strong pre-approvals win deals over weak ones, even at the same price. Sellers know the difference between a pre-approval from a real lender who actually verified your income versus a one-page

Offer Accepted

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online printout. In a competitive offer, your letter is doing work before the seller even sees the price. So let's go to step three, find the right agent. Why this comes after pre-approval, not before? Well, a good agent doesn't want to drive you around looking at houses you can't buy. It wastes your time, it wastes theirs, and it's emotionally brutal because you'll fall in love with something you can't afford. Pre-approval first, then agent. That's the order. So what makes an agent right for you? Well, let's start with experience matters, but specialty matters more. An agent who closes 30 deals a year mostly with move up luxury buyers may not be the right person to walk a nervous first-time home buyer through their first inspection. You want someone who has a great track record of working with first-time home buyers like yourself. One more thing on this: your lender and your agent should talk to each other, not after you're in contract, but before. When they're already a team, problems get solved at 8 p.m. instead of becoming emails you find on Monday morning. If your lender and your agent have never spoken before you're

Initial disclosures

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under contract, that's a potential problem you'll feel later. So let's go to step four, touring houses without losing your mind. Okay, so we're gonna talk about house hunt and writing the offer. A few things to know going in. You're going to walk into houses that look amazing in pictures and feel small in person. You're going to walk into houses that looked rough online and feel like home the second you cross the threshold. Pictures lie in both directions. Go see them and give yourself permission to not love every house. You're allowed to be picky because you're buying something that is hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars in some markets. And the offer is not just a price. This is where a lot of first-time homebuyers don't realize how much is in play. An offer has a price, yes, but it also has a closing timeline, an earnest money deposit, contingencies, what stays and what goes, and a credit request. All of that is negotiable and a strategy. In a tight market, the offer that wins is often not the highest one. It's actually the cleanest one. Faster close, fewer contingencies, stronger pre-approval letter, sellers want certainty more than they want an extra $2,000. One thing I want to make sure you understand here earnest money, that's your skin in the game. It's usually 1 to 3% of the purchase price, and it sits in escrow once your offer is accepted. You get it back if you walk away for the right reasons like bad inspection, low appraisal, and financing falling through. So let's talk about step five when you're under contract, inspection, appraisal, underwriting. So welcome to what I call the messy middle. This is where the most of the stress lives. Three things are happening at once, sometimes

Inspections

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overlapping, and any of them can change the deal. So let's start with the first one: inspection. What it is and what it isn't. So your job here is to not find a perfect house. Your job is to figure out what's a deal breaker versus what's a normal day in homeownership. Your agent will help, so will your lender if there's something the loan won't allow. The second one is called appraisal. Different thing, different purposes. This is the lender's check, not yours. The lender hires an independent appraiser to confirm the house is worth what you're paying. They're protecting their own collateral. If the appraisal comes in low, we have options renegotiate, bring more cash, or walk. We'll cover that in detail in another episode. The third one is underwriting, where loans live and die. Underwriting is a lender's deep dive review of your file. They'll verify everything, they'll ask for things you didn't expect, a random deposit from a month ago, a letter explaining a job gap from a year ago, an updated bank statement because the one you sent is now 31 days old. This is where people panicked. The questions don't mean something's wrong. They mean somebody is just doing their job and it's normal part of the process. Trust me on this one. So let's go to step six now, which is what I call clear to close and the final walkthrough. So clear to close, three words you definitely want to hear, clear to close. That means underwriting has signed off, the file is approved, and we're scheduling the closing. From here to keys is usually a few days to a week. The final walkthrough is typically 24 hours to a few days before closing. You walk the property one more time, you're checking that anything that was supposed to be repaired got repaired and that nothing got damaged on the way out the door. This is your last chance to flag an issue. Take it seriously and bring your agent. Look at every room. Then we go to step seven, closing day. What actually happens is you sign a stack of documents. It feels endless. It's not actually that bad. A good escrow officer will walk you through it. You wire your closing funds, the loan funds, the title records with the county, and the house is officially yours. Then you get the keys, and it doesn't feel real for a week, I would say. Or when you first wake up in your house and say, This is mine. That was my experience. So what no one tells you about day one is the mortgage is the smallest part of homeownership cost. Property taxes, insurance, HOA if you have one, utilities, maintenance, the random thing that breaks in a month or three, all of it adds up. A good lender and agent preps you for that before closing,

Appraisal

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not after. So that's the shape of it. The pre-work most people skip, seven steps from finding a lender all the way to keys. So you remember why every single one of those steps matters. Every one of those steps has its own episode coming. We're going to go deep on pre-approval, on offers, on what underwriting actually wants from you, on appraisals, on credit, on everything. This was the map, and the next episodes are the terrain. If you take one thing from this episode, take this. Buying a home isn't a transaction. It's a process you can either fight or flow with, and the people who flow with it end up with better houses, better rates, and a lot less stress. The information is the difference, and that's the whole point of this show. Here's my one ask before you go. If you have a friend who's thinking about buying their first home, even casually, send them this episode. Not because I'm trying to build an audience or to have more clients, although that is always great, but it's because the difference between a first-time homebuyer who knows what's coming and one who doesn't is the difference between a great experience and a miserable one. And you can give them that for free. One more thing, if you want some tools to play around with, fdhbpros.com has a couple of calculators on there free to use. Go check it out. If you want to talk to me directly, you can find my information on the website or in the show description. I'm also on Instagram at DatLones. You can also find the show's Instagram at FDHB Pros. DM us, I read everything. So until next time, keep learning. You're already ahead of where you were an hour ago.