When buying a home, you’re first priority should be to buy one that you can afford. To help you get more for your money, it’s important that you find the lowest mortgage rate possible.

How Mortgage Rates Affect Your Monthly Mortgage Payment

The lower your mortgage rate, the less you’ll have to pay each month. This means more savings each month and throughout your mortgage loan’s term. Even small changes in mortgage rates can have an impact on your monthly mortgage payment.

If you’re interested in seeing how different mortgage rates affect your monthly mortgage payment, enter in different interest rates in this Mortgage Payment Calculator.

Why Go Shopping for Mortgage Rates

While it’s easy to pick a lender and go with the first mortgage rate quoted, it’s not the most cost effective way to shop. Mortgage rates differ from location to location as well as from lender to lender. Therefore, while …

To get the lowest possible mortgage rate, you may want to consider doing a rapid rescore.

Understanding Rapid Rescore to Improve Your Credit Score

Rapid rescore is the process of taking out errors on your credit report. These errors decrease your credit score drastically and can inhibit your ability to receive the lowest possible mortgage rate available.

For example, if you have a balance on a credit card that you didn’t know about because of either an error on the creditor’s part or from identity theft, your credit score could be lowered by as much as 100 points. Once this error is corrected, you can have a rapid rescore done, which will increase your credit score and give you a better mortgage rate. The difference in mortgage rate from one credit score to another depends on how much it jumped after the credit rescore. With a 100 point jump however, …

As soon as young people reach the age of 18, credit card companies are targeting them. If you stroll any campus in America, you’ll surely find someone giving away something for opening up a credit card. An innocent college kid doesn’t understand that getting a credit card and over-using it, could be detrimental to their future finances.

Many college students are in debt. This is partly because they are unemployed and are using credit to purchase the things they want but can’t afford. Since, for many, this is the first time away from home, they don’t completely understand the toll of overspending.

This credit ignorance will follow them for many years after graduation as well. If they are unable to pay on their credit cards monthly, they will start to deal with creditors and their credit report is affected. Their credit score is hit and that is even before …