Using a Disabled Vet VA Loan

[David Dewey]

Hello Everyone,

I constantly see quite a bit stuff and discussion on the site about the VA programs. I have decided to jump in and talk about my VA loan Experience, and possibly help answer some questions about the process.

Recently, my wife and I bought a home in Maryland.  Both of us are vets, and she qualifies as a disabled vet, so we ended up using her loan.  By doing this we saved thousands in various fees.  I will admit that the process was a little bit more complicated than what I had first anticipated, but over all it went pretty smoothly.  The only problem that I ran into, is that I have a loan out for an investment property in Hawaii, and because of that our debt to income ratio was a little bit off.  We ended up having to pay off a few things to make the debt to income ratio under 55%. 

From start to finish, the entire process ended up taking about 3 months.  

Here are some of the figures:  

House cost $320,000. 

Interest Rate 3.75% (This was a little bit high, but we ended up rolling the remainder of car loan into the housing loan which made the interest rate go up a little bit)

Zero Down

Seller paid $10,000 in other closing cost

Got back $59 at the closing table 

So the question is would I use the VA loan again, yes...I did feel a little bit overwhelmed with the who process, but it was a good experience.

Please feel free to share any advice or experiences that you had.  Also if you have any questions, I would be willing to try to help out.