If you are a veteran, getting a VA home loan is a lot easier than getting a regular home loan. You do not have to fill out a lot of the paperwork, or supply most of the documents, that are required with regular home loans.
Your first step is to contact the local VA office and apply for a Certificate of Eligibility. Upon approval, you can start looking for a house and find the home you wish to purchase. Next, contact a VA approved lender. The lender will order an appraisal, pull credit and ask for income statements. Basic closing tasks are undertaken such as title checks. If no issues arise, the lender issues the loan and you move in.
One of the more time consuming tasks in a loan approval can be the appraisal process. To shorten this up, the VA has a program known as the Lender Appraisal Processing Program. Lenders approved for this program can essentially accept the appraisal as a go ahead and issue a loan on the amount. This can greatly speed up the approval process for veterans.
VA loans often require little or no down payment, whereas most non-military borrowers are looking at a ten to twenty percent down payment. This allows veterans the opportunity to purchase a property without having to go through the process of saving up funds for a down payment.
Most lenders require Private Mortgagers Insurance (PMI) when a borrower fails to pay at least 20 percent of the sales prices as a down payment. PMI is required because the lender wants to cover the risk of the loan being defaulted on before there is much equity in the property. Since there is no risk with the government guaranteeing repayment, there is no PMI requirement for VA loans. This advantage can save a borrower thousands of dollars.