Understanding the mortgage process: Your home loan toolkit

The Know Before You Owe mortgage disclosure rule makes getting a mortgage easier for homebuyers and refinancers. It helps you shop for the loan that’s best for you and your family.

To help you navigate the steps you have to take to get a mortgage, take a look at our new booklet, “Your Home Loan Toolkit: A Step-By-Step Guide .” This consumer-friendly booklet can help you as you think about, apply for, and close on a mortgage. The toolkit helps you calculate how much you can afford for a home, gives you questions to ask your lender, and features worksheets and checklists to fill out during the process.

“Your Home Loan Toolkit” is a resource we revised to help make the mortgage process more understandable. Congress required us to revise an existing booklet, called the Settlement Costs Booklet or the Special Information Booklet, to include some additional information. We reviewed core concepts in the toolkit with recent homebuyers to make sure it would be useful and reduced it from 71 pages to 25. When we asked consumers about our new toolkit and whether they thought it was understandable and useful, almost all of them told us they liked the new toolkit.

You’ll get a copy of “Your Home Loan Toolkit” from your lender if you are using the loan to purchase a home

Lenders are required to give you the toolkit within three business days after you apply for a loan to buy a home. The toolkit is designed to be used with the Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure, the two new disclosures that replace four overlapping mortgage forms for applications received on or after October 3, 2015.

You might see that a company has added its own logo to the cover of the toolkit. Companies and organizations are welcome to do this—please keep in mind that this doesn’t mean we’re endorsing that company or that we have screened the organization, their business, or the loans they might offer you.

Or, use “Your Home Loan Toolkit” whenever you start looking at mortgages

If you’re looking at mortgages, or deciding whether it’s the right time for you to buy a home, you might want to look over the toolkit today. It is filled with content that is helpful before you get to the application stage. It helps you determine how much of a monthly mortgage payment you can afford, explains how your credit affects the interest rate on your home loan, and gives you pointers on where to find more facts. You can download the toolkit . We also have a version in Spanish .

Visit "Buying a House" for more detailed guidance and interactive tools

If you are looking for more information on navigating the mortgage process, visit “Buying a House,” a digital suite of tools and resources where you can learn about loan options, explore interest rates, and print a user-friendly checklist to get you through the closing process.