Quicken Loans Recommended Mortgage Lender

Rating:  4 star rating

Types of loans available: 15 year fixed, 30 year fixed,  ARM,  FHA loans,  Jumbo Loans

                                               home purchase loans, refinance loans, reverse mortgages

See Top Rated Lender Here

 Review of Quicken Loans

Quicken Loans - like most people, a mortgage payment is your largest single monthly expense, it made sense to see if there was any wiggle room there. Many people have refinanced several times in the past, and although it's always been a tedious and time-consuming process, the effort has always resulted in a net savings, freeing up money for more important things.

Although even being generally conservative about such things, preferring the predictability of a 30 year fixed mortgage, this time around you can be a bit more aggressive, particularly since the mortgage industry has done a good job of coming up with new loan programs that offer the buyer considerably more flexibility than in the past.

After doing a little research, it was decided that I was in the market for what's called a 5/1 ARM, a 30 year adjustable rate loan that offers a fixed rate for the first 5 years of its term. The attractive thing about this loan is that the interest rate for fixed portion of the loan is considerably below the fixed rate for traditional 15 or 30 year mortgages. If your plans are to sell your house within the next few years, so the 5/1 ARM essentially buys the security of a fixed rate loan, but at a lower interest rate.

A wealth of online resources makes it very easy for me to get a sense of the market rates and associated refinancing fees for this kind of loan. Once the type of loan is determined and the general rate you need to pay we need to find the least expensive way to set up the loan for you.

Again, it was a relatively simple matter to compare lenders' fees. This website has many reviews of different mortgage lenders and is a great place to start. You will be able to get your loan requirements in front of any number of lenders, who then compete for your business.

Many people answer a lot of phone calls from people trying to sell them a loan, some of whom had a pretty hard sell approach. You need to quickly interrupt their sales pitch and narrow your questions down to specifics: For a loan of X dollars, what will my closing costs be, and what will my monthly payment be? By keeping all the extraneous information out of the conversation,  you can closely compare apples and apples.

 For some good reasons, when it came time to decide on a lender, you can choose Quicken. Once we agreed to go, things went very quickly. You need to give them your credit card number to cover a $500 deposit which is credited to your closing costs. With the deposit funds, Quicken  will arrange for a local appraiser to evaluate the house. The appraiser should contacted you within a day and  arrange a time for him to evaluate the property. While he completed his report, Quicken will walked you through the maze of paperwork that accompanies any of these transactions.

The loan documents will be emailed to you with much of the boilerplate information pre-filled based on info I had provided in my original online application and over the phone. Just print the forms, add a few additional bits of information, sign them, and fax them back to Quicken.

A week later, when the appraisal was submitted, the title, the flood plain, and numerous other bits of minutiae checked out, the loan documents were completed and Quicken will arrange for a notary to come to your house to get signatures on the final documents.