I was on the DR plan, got me outta debt, and am now down to 0 credit. I am finding "manual underwriting" to be way more laborious than DR makes it sound on his show. I am not a big fan of debt in general...I like to keep my life simple. The problem is when it comes to getting a mortgage, it is making life -less- simple, substantially so.
I have been in this zone for quite awhile and I'm not sure what to do. Most lenders act pretty clueless about how getting a credit card now would affect my credit. It seems to me that if I want to buy a house tomorrow, it could actually be worse. I have a lender now who is willing to work with me on the manual underwriting and he has said that I shouldn't change anything as it may negatively affect the situation. But it has taken me waaay longer to buy a house than I thought and it's frustrating that this whole time I could have been building credit. My wife has a credit card so I have options like being added on to her's, or we have to get a car soon...I could take out a small loan just to build credit?
Does anyone have anymore knowledge on this? What is the best approach if you are close to buying a house? Should I just stay the course until I do? Or will it not kill me to just get added to her's?
I should mention, I make $80k a year, have $80 for a down payment, about $120k in retirement savings, and we both have stable jobs(she makes $40k). Her credit is around 690-700 and I have been working with her at keeping that ratio good and churning to improve that.
Any thoughts? Again, we are trying to buy a house right now so I don't really have 9-12 months to take a temporary hit on credit with a new app. My understanding is that if I were to take something out now, my credit score could be like 100 which would actually look worse than 0 because it wouldn't be as clear that I am just not borrowing.