Your Credit, Serious Delinquency, and Your Mortgage

Summary

Your credit score is a basic measure of your financial health used by mortgage lenders.

If you have a serious delinquency on a credit line it will show up on your credit report.

This may impact you if you are looking for a mortgage to purchase a property, consolidate your debt, or refinance to lower your payment.

Basics

A serious credit delinquency is usually when a borrower is:

• 30, 60, or 90 days late

• items sent to collections

30, 60, or 90 Days Late

Your credit report lists all of your recent lines of credit with your creditors.

The credit report will list, by each item, if you have been late on that account by 30, 60, 90, or more days.

The more times you are late, and the later you are, the more your credit score will be lowered.

When you are late that will usually be recorded on your credit by which month you were late in and how many days you were late.

For example, you may have a 30 day late in January 2005, or a 60 day late in June 2006. In this way a mortgage lender knows when you were late and by how much.

An occasional late by 30 days on a credit card may be understandable. A late on a mortgage payment is a big red flag.

There are specialized mortgage lenders who will work with borrowers who are late on their mortgages by 30 days, 60 days, or more.

Items Sent To Collections

These are very serious and impact your credit.

These can often be small amounts that a borrower doesn't even know about.

This is why it can be very helpful to a borrower to monitor their credit.

Sometimes small items such as cell phone bills end up in collections. Often times the name of the creditor will change because the debt is now owned by a debt collection company.

Lenders often can be distracted when a borrower has many small collections items. It shows to the mortgage lender a sloppiness or indifference to managing credit that will make the lender think twice about approving a mortgage application.