Not three percent. Not one percent. Qualified buyers with full entitlement finance the entire purchase price and keep their savings for the move itself. What it takes is meeting the service requirement and holding a Certificate of Eligibility, which we pull for you. The common benchmarks are 90 days during wartime, 181 days in peacetime, or six years in the Guard or Reserve, and there are exceptions in both directions, so do not rule yourself out on the math alone.

Conventional charges mortgage insurance until you reach enough equity. FHA charges it for the life of the loan on most files. VA has never charged it, at any down payment, and that is money that stays in your account every month you own the house. It is also the reason a VA payment often lands below a conventional payment on the very same price.

VA is the one program where seller credits can go toward paying off your debts at the closing table, not just your closing costs. A car loan or a credit card balance retired at closing comes straight out of your debt to income ratio, and that raises the price you qualify for.

Total allowable seller credits run to 8 percent of the purchase price, split as 4 percent toward concessions like debt payoff or a temporary rate buydown, and 4 percent toward closing costs. Whether a seller agrees to any of it is a negotiation, and negotiating is the other half of what we do here.

Income you do not pay tax on can be grossed up for qualifying purposes, which raises the income we are allowed to use without you earning another dollar. For a service member drawing BAH, or a veteran receiving disability compensation, that one adjustment can move a pre-approval by a meaningful amount.

Put it next to the seller credit card and you are working on debt to income from both directions at the same time, income up and debt down. That combination is where most of the surprise purchasing power on a VA file comes from.

We are approved with a wholesale lender that will look at VA files with scores down to 550. A lower score means the rest of the file gets a closer look, it does not mean the answer is no.

And when the automated system will not issue an approval, a live underwriter can still review the file by hand against VA's own residual income and compensating factor rules. A lot of good files get approved right there, after somebody else already said no.

VA removed loan limits for borrowers with full entitlement. The county conforming figure you see quoted everywhere is a conventional benchmark, and on a VA loan it only caps you when your entitlement is partial, for example when you already have a VA loan outstanding or a prior one that has not been restored.

With full entitlement your ceiling is what you qualify for and what the home appraises at. We run that math before you ever walk a house, so you are shopping with a real number.

Entitlement restores when a VA loan is paid off, so this was never a one time benefit. Two eligible veterans buying together can split entitlement between them, which leaves each of them room for a future VA loan, and if one has a qualifying service connected disability the funding fee is waived on their portion.

Second tier entitlement can allow a qualified borrower to carry two VA loans at once. That is the exact situation a PCS creates, and it is the question we get asked least and should get asked most.

The VA guarantees a portion of your loan, which lowers what the lender stands to lose. VA financing has historically priced below comparable conventional loans for that reason.

What you are actually offered depends on your file, the program and the market that day, which is why we shop it across our wholesale lenders instead of quoting you one company's sheet.

California's Disabled Veterans' Exemption can reduce the assessed value of a qualifying veteran's principal residence, with a larger exemption available to households under an income limit. An unmarried surviving spouse may be able to claim it as well.

It is administered by your county assessor, not by a lender, and the amounts adjust every year. We bring it up because it changes what the home actually costs you to own, and because nobody selling you a loan has any reason to mention it.