When buying a home, you want to be sure you’re making decisions that will help you find your dream home! Finding the perfect home in Del Mar can take a while, and you have to be careful. Realtors can sometimes be sneaky when they’re guiding you to make these decisions. You don’t want to end up owning a home that you can’t truly afford! In San Diego, there’s a group of San Diego realtors that you can trust and depend on.

Here are 7 myths of buying a home that realtors want you to believe:

1) You Need to Have Amazing Credit

To get the best mortgage rates on the market, you usually have to have pretty great credit. The lower your credit is, the rates available to you become worse. If your credit is low enough, you may not be able to be offered a loan at all. However, if you want to be a homeowner before you repair your credit, there are still options available for you. The guidelines for credit on an FHA loan are a lot more lenient than for most conventional loans, your score can be as low as 580 to qualify and you’ll only be required to pay 3.5 percent down!

2) Buying is Always Better Than Renting

This is not always true. It depends largely on the price of the home and how long you are planning to be staying in it. You will want to keep it long enough to get through any dips in the real estate market, and it can generally take five to seven years just to break even with the costs of buying, owning, and selling a home. You want to make sure that you will keep the home for at least that long. If this means that you’ll be missing out on a job opportunity in another city, it can be a real cost.

3) Everyone Can Write off all the Mortgage Interest From Taxes

While it can be true that most taxpayers are able to write off the interest that they pay on their mortgage loan as a tax deduction, the value of the tax write-off could be less than you think. charitable contributions exceed your standard deduction.

4) The Seller will Make Repairs Based on the Inspection Report

Your agent will help you as much as they can when it comes to negotiating repairs after a home inspection, but sometimes you won’t be that lucky. If they don’t hire someone to do the repairs before the escrow closes, you’ll probably have to do them on your own. Either they’re in no rush to move and can wait for more offers to come up, or they already have several offers on the table, a few of which may not have even asked for assistance with repairs.

5) The Asking Price is Always the Selling Price

Sometimes if you see a home you are extremely interested in but is out of your price range, you may not even consider pursuing it, but there are many factors to contemplate when it comes to what you are able to put in for an offer and what you can walk away with. If the house has been on the market for a while, it’s probably a good sign that it’s overpriced. A lot of sellers will be willing to negotiate and bring down the price significantly if this is the case. The seller may also reduce the price even more if an inspection comes back with repairs that need to be made to the home.

6) The Down Payment is the Only Cost that’s Upfront

This could appear to be the case at first, but as you start moving towards the end of the home-buying process, more closing costs will come up. While in some cases the seller will cover some of all of the closing costs, in other cases they won’t cover anything. When you move in, you’ll probably find some things that need to be fixed or improved, and you’ll be spending some money on re-furnishing your home. You’ll also want an emergency fund after moving in to cover expenses such as a mortgage payment if you get into any financial complications.

7) Always Choose a Mortgage Lender with the Lowest Lnterest Rate

Like any other purchases you make, cost is always a big factor but the differences in fees matter much more than that. Furthermore, mortgage lenders are not just a product or service. In an aggressive buying market like a lot of housing markets are seeing, the reliability of your lender may mean the difference between landing your dream home and losing it to another offer, so you want a lender with a good reputation and not just the lowest rate. You also need someone who can work well