Today we want to highlight one of our clients who’s on a mission to get everyone into a home of their own. Mortgage Grants helps homebuyers and realtors find a variety of mortgage assistance and other first time home buyer grants to help low and middle income buyers escape the rent cycle and break into the middle class. One of the most important of these types of grants is the downpayment assistance program.
What’s a Down Payment Assistance Program?
Downpayment assistance is designed to lower or eliminate the high financial barrier that prevents people from becoming homeowners. A lot of people simply don’t have the resources to save up for a massive down payment. Down payment assistance covers part or all of the cost, and might also help to address closing costs for buyers. There are a lot of different kinds of programs like this around, and they all work a little differently.
-Good Neighbor Next Door - Provides loans to teachers, police officers, and firefighters, and emergency medical professionals in low income areas-
-Agriculture Rural Development Housing & Community Facilities - Provides assistance to low income buyers in rural areas
-HOME - Provides assistance to low income families with an income under 60% of the local adjusted median income
-A huge variety of block grant programs that are applied differently in every county in the country.
A lot of these programs are built to work in conjunction with an FHA loan, which work differently than a regular mortgage.
What’s an FHA Loan?
A normal down payment in the U.S. costs about 20% of the size of your mortgage. Because that’s out of reach of a huge number of Americans, the government offers FHA loans to qualified first-time homebuyers, which only require a 3% down payment. This greatly reduced costs is much more manageable, and other mortgage assistance programs exist to help people tackle the remaining 3% for those who need it.
With the help from the team at Mortgage Grants, first time homebuyers and realtors can learn about and find these grants much more easily than ever before. With them around, there’s no reason to continue renting.