Loan Qualification Standards: Qualifying Rate and Payment

Somebody recently asked me about a deferred payment mortgage for a purchase. The long and the short of the story is that they don't have any cash to put down, and they can't qualify for the payments under any kind of reasonable debt to income ratio.

A couple of years ago, in the era of Make Believe Loans, we could have gotten this person a loan. It wouldn't have been the smartest thing in the world, but we could have done it.

Even then, however we would have to have dealt with calculating debt to income ratio, as well as the fact that purchase money loans evaluate the property on a lower of cost or market basis, where the appraisal is the "market" and the official purchase price is "cost." Since it's the lesser of the two values that is used, there is never equity at purchase in excess of whatever down payment you make, at least as far as the lender is concerned.

A paper fixed rate loans use the fixed rate of the loan for calculating front end ratio. They are permitted to use a higher rate than actual, but not a lower one. If your rate is 6%, and they use 6.25% because the rate isn't actually locked on a $300,000 thirty year fixed rate loan, the number they will use is $1847.16. This is not an arbitrary number; it's the most important measurement of whether or not you can afford the loan. The front end ratio, which is the loan payment itself, is not generally a deal breaker if it's too high, but the back end ratio, which is the loan combined with taxes, insurance, homeowner's association, and all your other monthly debt service, is. Those other numbers are all fixed based upon your situation. You owe what you owe, property taxes are what they are, and you only make what you make - or actually, as far as the lender is concerned you make what you can prove you make. I've spoken against overstating your income from the very first on this site.

When you move to A paper ARMs, the allowable back debt to income ratio actually goes down, usually to 38% from 45%. Not only that, but the rate used to compute the payments is usually much higher than actual. The calculations require the use of, not the initial rate on the note, but the final, fully indexed rate on the note. They use current rate for the underlying index the ARM is based upon, plus the rate margin. Say the initial loan rate is 5.25% but the underlying index is at 4.75% plus a margin of 2.25%, they will use 7% for the purposes of determining whether or not you actually qualify for the loan. In the $300,000 example above, this means they'll use $1995.91, even though the actual rate and payment is lower - and due to lower maximum debt to income ratio, the ceiling on what you can afford at a given income level will be lower. Depending upon the lender, they may even add a bit of a margin to that qualifying rate. This makes it significantly harder to qualify for an A paper hybrid ARM than a fixed rate loan, even though the rates and payments are lower, and is certainly one reason why there aren't more of these loans out there. Nonetheless, this procedure they use for qualification does mean that someone who manages to qualify should be able to afford whatever the payment eventually adjusts to.

One of the reasons subprime loans got so popular was that they stopped using this method of determining whether an applicant qualified for the loan. The subprime lenders started qualifying applicants based strictly upon the minimum initial payment, despite the fact that they knew good and well that the payment was going to adjust upwards at a known time. Even if the initial payment was "interest only" or negative amortization. They just assumed that the people would get raises, be able to refinance with increased equity, or just be able to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, or something else equally hope based. Three strong verses of "Kumbaya" would have been about as intelligent, but it worked so long as Wile E. Coyote didn't look down. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this is one of the reasons why subprime crashed so hard, especially in conjunction with stated income loans. Because this made it absurdly easy to qualify for a loan, especially a larger loan than people could really afford, subprime loans were ridiculously popular for a while, even among people who should have been able to qualify for A paper had they limited their budget to what they could afford. When the adjustments hit, it was predictable as gravity that those folks who qualified subprime couldn't make their payments. When the market values stopped rising so quickly that they supported serial refinancing, it didn't take very long for large scale problems to emerge. In the overall scheme of things, subprime loan qualification was good for real estate agents who wanted easy commission checks, irresponsible loan officers, and people with the sense to cash out of the market while things were still going crazy. For the people who applied for subprime loans, not so much.

You should want to qualify with the toughest standards you can meet, preferably A paper full documentation, and even the A paper ARM standards if you can, but this concept was a little bit difficult to get across to the people who already had their hearts set on a property that was way too expensive for them, especially when everyone else is encouraging the speculative atmosphere. It got to the point where newspapers were running articles on "What's a fair margin over index for negative amortization loans," when the correct response would have been, "RUN AWAY."

The whole situation is enough to make you understand exactly how many people outsmarted themselves in pretty much the same wise as the people pictured in this clip:

Unlike the fictional characters portrayed, however, the consequences for borrowers who get in too deep does not end when the director yells, "Cut!" You might want to bear this in mind when figuring out exactly how much loan you can really qualify for. Even the subprime lenders who survived have now figured it out, proving that even the silliest English Knight ("Ca-niggit") can learn when the pain gets bad enough.

Caveat Emptor