Knowledge and experience are the keys to successful real estate transactions.

Working as your agent, I can provide you with an enormous amount of valuable information. Such data, combined with my expertise, experience and training, can be an essential key to your success.

One of the keys to making the home buying process easier and more understandable is planning. In doing so, you’ll be able to anticipate requests from lenders, lawyers and a host of other professionals. Furthermore, planning will help you discover valuable shortcuts in the home buying process.

12 Steps to Financing Your New Home

1. Find a lender. Ask friends, family or co-workers for referrals; speak with local real estate agents; search the Internet.

2. Fill out a loan application.

3. Get an estimate of closing costs from the lender you choose. By law, the lender is required to provide this statement to you within three days of receiving the loan application. Make sure to ask what type of loan program your lender has selected for you, including the rates, terms and any special information, such as prepayment penalties.

4. Compare costs, fees and terms of loans if you are working with more than one lender.

5. Negotiate fees. Sometimes you can negotiate the amount of fees or loan points (a point is 1 percent of the loan amount) the lender charges you.

6. Consider lowering your interest rate by paying more points. The relationship of interest rate to points paid is an inverse one; the more points you pay, the lower the interest rate.

7. Provide required documentation.

8. Pay any up-front fees. Sometimes the lender requires that the appraisal, or processing fee be paid at the beginning.

9. Review loan papers. Approximately one week prior to closing, loan papers will be ready for your review. Make sure the loan matches the original quote you were given.

10. Sign your loan papers and your down payment funds into your account four to six days prior to closing.

11. Bring a cashier’s check for the down payment to the title company, escrow company or attorney handling the closing. The lender will send the title company a check for the loan amount.

12. Get ready to congratulate yourself! Once the transaction closes and you have signed off on all contingencies, you will receive a copy of the deed and a set of keys, and you then own the home!

Does Fannie or Freddie own My Loan?

Look Up Your Loan

If your mortgage is owned by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, you could qualify for a Making Home Affordable Refinance and take advantage of the lower interest rates offered by the Making Home Affordable Program. Only mortgage loans owned or guaranteed by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae are eligible. Your mortgage lender should be able to inform you as to who owns your mortgage loan or you can contact Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae directly by clicking on the links below and completing the forms for each company.

* 1-800-7FANNIE (8am to 8pm EST)
* www.fanniemae.com/loanlookup

* 1-800-FREDDIE (8am to 8pm EST)
* www.freddiemac.com/mymortgage

The Post-Foreclosure Wait

-The New York Times

MORTGAGE troubles won’t necessarily shut you out of the housing market forever.

As the economy and real estate market continue to struggle, millions of Americans have lost their homes through foreclosure, short sale (when a property is sold for less than is owed) or a deed in lieu of foreclosure (when the bank takes ownership without foreclosure).

Even if you think you never want to own a home again, clean credit is important. Bad credit can make it more expensive to rent. In some fields, especially financial services, it can make it difficult to find or keep a job.

How quickly your credit score improves depends in part on how the problem is reported, said Sarah Davies, a senior vice president of VantageScore in Stamford, Conn., a credit-scoring company that competes with FICO, the dominant scoring system.

In a short sale where the balance is forgiven and no deficiency is recorded in public records, recovery can be quick. “Simply paying all your debts on time could bring your score up to a reasonable range in nine months,” Ms. Davies said. “Reasonable” may not qualify you for a mortgage, but it will help in other situations.

A foreclosure or bankruptcy can weigh you down for years. FICO has found that it takes three years for a borrower to pull a score back up to a fair-to-middling 680 after a foreclosure, according to Joanne Gaskin, a company director. A borrower who started out with a near-perfect 780 score would take about seven years to climb all the way back.

But if someone has gone through foreclosure and still has a mountain of debt and not enough income, bankruptcy is worth considering, said Tracy Becker, the founder of North Shore Advisory, a credit-restoration company based in Tarrytown, N.Y. Sure, it will be another hard blow to your credit rating — but your credit most likely is already “wrecked,” at least for now, she said.

Bankruptcy can wipe out some debt. “The choices you make for the future about your financial options should be based on how bad your credit is,” Ms. Becker said. With one 30-day-late payment, for instance, “don’t assume your credit is ruined forever,” she said. It’s easier to recover from that than it would be to pull back from a string of late payments.

And what about a future mortgage? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration set guidelines for how long a borrower must wait after a “significant derogatory event.”

There are plenty of asterisks and conditions. But to generalize, the wait is longest after a foreclosure. Extenuating circumstances like a job loss, illness or divorce reduce the wait.

With such circumstances, Fannie and Freddie specify a two-year wait after a short sale, deed in lieu, or discharge or dismissal of bankruptcy, and three years after foreclosure. Without extenuating circumstances, waits can extend to four years after bankruptcy and seven years after foreclosure.

“The key is to avoid the foreclosure,” said Andrew Wilson, a spokesman for Fannie Mae. “That is what will help you be eligible for the shorter period.”

As for F.H.A.-insured loans, they are available three years after a foreclosure, assuming perfect credit afterward, and two years after a bankruptcy is discharged. After a short sale, there’s a three-year wait if the borrower is in default at the time of the sale and there are no extenuating circumstances. If the borrower was on time with all payments for 12 months before the sale, there is no wait specified, meaning that an F.H.A. loan might be available immediately. Among the conditions: A loan isn’t available if the short sale was to “take advantage of declining market conditions,” according to the F.H.A. Home Loan Handbook for lenders.

One caveat: All of this assumes you have income to pay off debts and stay afloat. It’s likely to be a long time before the mortgage market returns to an anyone-can-borrow-anything way of thinking.