After viewing several properties you will probably find one that you may have an interest in making an offer on a house to purchase and obtaining a military loan or VA loan. While there may be some apprehension, your Realtor and VA Lender should be able to help calm your nerves.  Making a purchase offer is a very common practice and you will get through it.

If you have taken the right steps, such as working with the right Realtor and getting pre-approved by the right VA Lender for your VA home loan, the only thing left is getting an accepted purchase offer and doing the proper inspections. 

MAKING A PURCHASE OFFER

Before or when you are about to begin making an offer to purchase a home you should make sure that both your Realtor and VA Lender talk about your offer. If your Realtor does not know how your VA Lender structured your VA home loan financing, it could end up costing your more or cause you to have to renegotiate your purchase offer at the last minute.

One of the items that is specific to a VA loan is that there are some charges that are not allowed to be paid by the buyer. These are called NON-ALLOWABLES. Generally when making a purchase offer for a VA home the seller is asked to pay for these items. Your Realtor and VA Lender must know what these charges are in order to ask the seller to pay them. If your seller does not pay them, your VA Lender may pay them, but this may result in a higher interest rate on your loan. 

The other item that the seller may pay is any of your other closing costs. This could be such items as origination or discount points, title charges, pre-paid items, or other closing costs. While this is not required of the seller, having the seller pay some of the buyer’s closing costs can reduce the buyer’s amount of cash needed to close. This is a very effective strategy for first time buyers who have very little cash to work with at this time. If you are asking the seller to pay some of your closing costs associated with your VA loan, you are now becoming a "terms buyer" rather and a "cash buyer" and will probably pay slightly more for the home than a person with cash for their closing costs. Sellers generally have a “bottom line” net sales price and will not go below that number to pay for buyers closing costs. 

An example of this would be a home that is listed for $100,000

In this example the seller’s “bottom line net" was $97,000. The seller will net approximately same amount under either scenario. However, the buyer in Example #2 will reduce his closing cost by approximately $2,500. Since his purchase price is slightly higher, the buyer will have a slightly higher mortgage payment of approximately $18 per month. This can sometimes be a better strategy for a Buyer that is tight on funds to close their loan. Again this is why your Realtor and Lender should work as a team in helping you with your purchase.