So, "no" is the answer lately because banks have been offering crazy mortgages lately. Shop around and you'll probably find one that will give you 100% financing. However, if you put down less than 20%, you will absolutely be paying PMI (private mortgage insurance). It costs 0.5-1.0% of your loan amount annually. So, roughing it out and simplifying, you get a $300k house, your total loan amount will be around $310k. Let's make you lucky and give you 0.5% PMI. So $310,000 x 0.5% = $1550. Divide that over 12 months and it looks like about $130 per month. That's $130 every month that you're giving the bank for no reason other than their own risk mitigation. It does nothing for you. You're basically paying the bank for the privilege of putting zero or very little money down on your house. You can eventually request that it be removed, but not until you have substantial equity in the home, which will take years.   Other than that, you pay interest on your loan amount, not the home price. So more money down = less interest paid to the bank.   Idk what your budget is, but go play with some online loan payment calculators. The good ones will let you adjust PMI, taxes, and insurance.  ... View more

Easiest way is online, though you can mail your stuff in or call the VA and they'll walk you through it. Anyway, go to ebenefits.va.gov and log in. Once you've gotten through the security screens and notices, click "apply" on the left kinda near the top, scroll down to "housing" and to the right of that you should see something about a "certificate of eligibility". Click that and it'll walk you through the rest (it's very simple). Your COE is all the bank needs to start a VA loan process. To get the COE, you'll need your DD214 if you're already out, or some other stuff that's easy to get if you're still active.   A word for way in the future: If you sell a house that you've gotten with a VA loan, you'll probably need to reset your allowance on your COE to use it again. It's easy, but you have to remember to do it before you try to get a loan again. Also, the first time use your COE, the VA funding fee is super low and independent of your down payment amount. Any future loans with your COE have funding fees that vary with down payment amount. However, on this same subject, if you have a disability of 10% (don't quote me on that number, I didn't look it up and I don't quite remember) or more, the VA funding fee is $0 forever and your down payment amount will never matter. Yay free loans! Now don't forget to go talk to the VA when you leave active duty to set up your disability. Even 0% yields some small perks.  ... View more

I agree with these other two guys, but I want to tack a bit of info onto what Stark said about first time home buyer "perks". While he's right and small down payments of 10, 5, or even 0% may be possible, I advise against them. If you put down less than 20%, you will very likely have to pay for PMI (private mortgage insurance). This is insurance for the bank that does nothing for you. It's the bank's way of mitigating risk when they hand you a house with very little (or even negative) equity, as would be the case if you made a tiny down-payment. The cost can be up to 1% of your loan amount annually. So, this varies with the cost of your house, but I did quick numbers, and even with a $250k loan and a minimum PMI of 0.5%, that's an extra $104/month you're shelling out in your mortgage payment for absolutely no reason.     ... View more

So, I'm going to tell you some stuff that is purely for your credit score. What I mean, is the following may not be beneficial to you financially, and some people would call some of these ideas financially irresponsible; however, you asked about your credit score, so here we go. I will put financial advice interjection in parenthesis, but I am not your financial advisor.    To directly answer your question, it doesn't matter if you make your minimum payment every month, or if you pay a credit card off in full, or you do something in between. The way that gets reported is just "paid" or "not paid". Either way, you get a shiny green check in the box on that account. (Pay your account off in full every month. Never put more on your card than you can afford to pay off when the statement closes. Interest = bad).   On time/missed payments account for the largest portion of your score, but there are three more categories for your score that are worth mentioning when talking about credit cards.   1. Number of active accounts. An account is any line of credit: car loan, mortgage, credit card card, personal loan, etc. The total number of active, aka "not paid off", loans you have matters. To clarify, paying off a credit card every month does not make it inactive; the inactive bit refers to closed accounts, like if you pay off your car. There is a happy medium here, though. Too many or too few can negatively impact your credit. If you only have one credit card, it is very likely that you would benefit from opening more accounts. (Do not open more accounts than you need, or, at least, don't overspend because you have more credit lines. Your job is still to pay off everything when statements close. Many people use one or even zero credit cards because they don't have self control and would overspend. Better to take a hit to your score than go into a pile of debt that you can't handle. There are plenty of financially savvy people who don't use credit cards, and plenty more who have 10. I have 3. You do what works for you.)   2. Debt-to-income ratio. This is just what you owe against what you bring in. As you pay down long term debt, this gets better. Your credit cards also play a role here, though. Every credit card company reports your card balance every month and this affects your score. Most companies report your statement balance, but some do other weird things. I have Visa and Amex; they both report statement balance. A lower statement balance will raise your score for the following month. If your statement balance is $1000 and you pay it off in full, the reported amount is still $1000. The next month, it could be $2000, and, even though you pay it off in full again, you will see a score drop just because your reported debt is higher than it was. The next month is $1000 again, and your score will bounce back. Just saying, this is one of the things that causes month-to-month fluctuations.   3. Average age of credit. This is exactly what it sounds like. They take the age of all of your active lines of credit, and average them. Buy a new car? You get a zero thrown in there and a score drop with it, though that drop is more due to your new debt than the drop in your average age of credit. Every month all of your open credit lines get one month older, so this slowly improves on its own... kind of. Loans get completely removed from the equation when you pay them off. Like a 30 year mortgage. That will eventually be a really old line of credit that does wonders for your average, but at the 30 year mark while you are celebrating because you paid off your house, your credit score will drop. (Financially stupid to not pay things off early if you have the means just because you are worried about your average age of credit. You should virtually ignore this category.) Now, this is where credit cards really shine. Credit cards just keep ticking up as long as you don't close the accounts. I have a credit card that I haven't used in 4 years that I won't close because it boosts my credit score. (If you do something like that, you still have to check the balance every month. Credit theft/fraud is real.)   Anyway, I'm glad you're interested in your finances. Keep it up. Of all the finance things I know, however, credit score management is probably the least important. So keep learning.  ... View more

You can call the hospital's billing department. I had this same thing happen to me. I was a passenger in a wreck and the driver's insurance just didn't cover anything and no one said anything. Months and months go by and I figure out it's in collections and no one said said a thing to me.  The end result: Ultimately, it's your fault for not paying your bill, so you can't get the blemish erased from your report even though the circumstances are ridiculous (I tried). The billing department told me how to pay it, so it was changed on my credit report to at least say "paid" next to it, which is better, but still not great. Then, yeah, waited 7 years or however long for it to finally disappear. So, sorry about your bad luck, but I think this just must be something hospitals are terrible at.  ... View more

Tl;dr - The government won't actually give you money (mostly true), so if the full $4k would bring your actual taxes paid for the year below zero, you can't have it.    The CTC has nothing to do with daycare costs. Those 20-35% numbers are just an indication of what they intend by the credit. Daycare is a deduction though, so that's nice. Anyway, your number probably has something to do with the rest of your tax situation. Your refund can't bring your taxes owed for the year below zero. My own case: I got the full $4k for my 3 and 4 year old this year. However, this has never happened before. In previous years I had other credits and deductions that quickly plummeted my taxes owed to zero. If you pay $10k in taxes during the year, your refund check can't exceed $10k (zero taxes paid). If that tax credit would put your refund check over $10k, that just can't happen, so you get it reduced. Technically, it's not the CTC anymore if that happens; it's the ACTC, which caps at $1400. More reading if you're interested: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-child-tax-credit ... View more

Just to add to this, a perk of using turbo tax is that it will remember your carryover. I did solar 5 or 6 years ago. I got the ITC in bits and pieces over the next 3-4 years, but every year, turbo tax knew it had to pull the form for it and knew what the carryover balance from the previous year was. Just a little something to make life easier.  ... View more

I agree with tagteam; his plan will definitely work. However, I would start by calling your bank. You have a relationship with them and they can at least point you in the right direction, if not offer you something on the spot. If you have USAA (highly recommended), they have ridiculously helpful customer service.  ... View more

Yeah, your last guess is right. Your score is just a quick reference guide for a lender to see how risky it is to lend you money. If you've been borrowing money and paying people back, you're low risk, so you'll have a higher score. If you've been borrowing money and not paying it back, you're obviously high risk and will have a low score. But if you have no history of borrowing money, you're an unknown. And unknown is risky. Thus low score. Still, worth checking your report to see if anyone has been using your identity to borrow money irresponsibly, but I wouldn't be surprised if you just found it to be empty with no errors.  ... View more