As many other borrowers, you probably got deceived by the APR’s apparent similarity to the interest rate and assumed that “locking the rate” means locking all the rates involved. Unfortunately for borrowers, that is not the case. The APR does not only include the interest rate and the points, which do get locked, but also the closing costs, origination fees and other cash-based parameters, which do not get locked, ever. When you lock the rate, you lock the interest rate and the points only. In the time between the locking and the closing, the lender is free to change all the other included into the APR fees at will. Some lenders are not shy to exercise the right. An increased APR means that at closing you will have to pay more than the original estimation of charges. It is always hard to say whether it originally was an intentional underestimation of costs presented by the lender in an attempt to attract a customer, though.

Did she say she was? Anyway, the promises sound very much like the ones of an upfront broker and the easiest way to find out how much truth there is to them is to go to the official site of The Upfront Mortgage Brokers Association (UMBA), use the search tool and see if your broker’s name is listed for the area. If it is not, your broker may exercise certain principles of the upfront concept in her work, but there is no guarantee as to how consistent she will be in sticking to all the rules. The fact that in spite of all the implied similarity in ways she is not a member of the UMBA suggests that there are certain requirements that she prefers not to bind herself with or the Association were not happy enough with her performance to admit her, if she ever applied. Upfront price disclosure and wholesale prices are not everything that makes a real UMB. There is a lot of ethics involved (read my article); moral guarantees that ultimately lead to financial satisfaction.

The claims she made may also happen to be just empty claims used to attract a customer. To make sure she does as she says, it is recommended to sign an agreement based on The UpFront Mortgage Broker Commitment (page 3 of the document) before you commit yourself.

Strange as it may seem, the score should not be there. This is the biggest disappointment about every credit report, no matter how accurate it is there is no indication of the actual credit score (the FICO score) in it. The report you get reflects your credit activities, it does not give you the magic three digits. If you want to know what your credit activities total to, you have to pay and then the bureaus will provide you with the score. The bureaus (www.equifax.com, www.experian.com, www.transunion.com) also run temporary offers to get the score for free, but you have to be careful and read all the conditions and terms scrupulously, otherwise you may end up charged for some membership you don’t want. There is one other web-site www.myfico.com that provides the real FICO scores, and that’s it. No other web-site is authorized to tell you your credit score. If somebody claims they are, it may well be that you are being scammed. Nobody can buy a whatever score one wishes for from anyone.

As there are three different bureaus, there will be three FICO scores that may differ a bit for the same reason as the reports differ. The scores are derived totally from the information in the reports.

It is a recent change: the authorized user information is not taken into account by the three credit score bureaus any more, so no authorized user can build any score this way. Fair Isaac Corporation’s newest FICO scoring model ignores authorized user accounts when calculating Classic FICO credit risk scores. As it is stated on the Company’s website, this action is intended to protect lenders and FICO scores from abuse of authorized user credit card accounts by a new kind of credit repair service that sells consumer credit card histories to credit applicants in order to purposefully misrepresent the applicants’ own credit history to lenders and other businesses.

It is a snowball effect. For example, you skip a payment in May. Delinquency. Then you pay your regular monthly amount in June. However, the system of amortizing a mortgage works in such a way that your June amount is used to pay off the May debt, but then there is no money left for actually the June period payment itself. Delinquency – 2. If the next month you don’t pay 2 monthly amounts, it results in delinquency – 3, etc. Many borrowers are unaware of this effect and do not even know about the trouble until they see the delinquencies in the report. The only way to go from there is to get current with the mortgage payments and wait. Delinquency stays on the record for 7 years, but its negative power declines with time.