TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.

  • daq@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 months ago

    Lots of sellers will prefer cash or regular loans so your application is very likely to be last in line. Plus the applications are much, much more complicated and mortgage applications are already a bitch. But then it’s usually a once in a lifetime experience and may be the only option for a lot of people do this is more of a heads up than an attempt to discourage anyone from applying.

    • Sybil@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      we lost 4 bids and saw almost 2 dozen houses before finding a winner

    • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Cash I understand, but what’s the reasoning behind sellers preferring regular loans instead?

      • Sybil@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        USDA isn’t gonna buy a fixer upper. they want people to have safe housing. this might mean the seller is going to need to fix the problems

        for us, we liked that, but it did mean we lost our on a couple bids. which was good: we found a real jewel.

        • daq@lemmy.sdf.org
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          10 months ago

          In a hot market/location this will never happen. Even with a regular loan there’s a bidding war on houses with obvious issues.

          • Sybil@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            i live in a hot market. i got one. it was a slog, but it happened.

            edit: we were approved in november. we put in multiple offers and had to periodically get re-approved by the usda, but we had an offer accepted mid march and closed in april.

            for a brief period, we kept the “apartment in the city” for a month and moved one sub-compact car worth of belongings across town every night. not really relevant, but i’m going to remember fondly the brief time that we kept an apartment in the city, because that shit is never gonna happen again for poor schlubs like us.

        • Pulptastic@midwest.social
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          10 months ago

          This. The inspection and repair criteria are higher than for private lending. We sold our house to someone using this program and had to fix stuff that we didn’t need fixed when we bought the house. It wasn’t a huge deal but it did add a week to the process to get it fixed and reinspected.