Buying a house with a VA loan ...

[Tamzyn]

If you have orders to say Phoenix, can you look into buying a house 3 or 4 months before you arrive there and get it with a VA loan as your primary home? Or do you have to wait until you get there?

[thejigsup]

Originally Posted by Tamzyn If you have orders to say Phoenix, can you look into buying a house 3 or 4 months before you arrive there and get it with a VA loan as your primary home? Or do you have to wait until you get there?

Yes, you can do this. You cannot buy it and rent it out before you occupy though. We went in October to buy a house we would occupy in January of the next year. Closing was in December. As long as you will occupy the house as your primary residence you'll be fine. If you are a USAA member, go through their moving program and if you buy a house from the realtor they give you in the area, they give you a $1,250 gift card... You don't have to use USAA for the mortgage.

[wb3690]

yes you absolutely can do this.

We used the VA loan for our current house. We bought it from Hawaii and then moved into it after it was done being built. We used the USAA Moving Advantage Program.....it was helpful to find a good realtor in the area as we talked to a few others that just weren't a good fit for us. Anyway we bought a new build and received a check for 1000.00 just for using that program.

It was a pretty easy process....and we didn't use USAA for financing since our builder's lender had great incentives for us.....

good luck!

[~*Dawn*~]

We used the VA (and chose Wells Fargo as our lender) and began the process (loan estimates, getting in touch with a realtor, etc) in September. We took our 6 days of house hunting leave, toured dozens of houses and put out a contract which got approved hours before we left (Dec 14). Everything else was taken care of via email and snailmail. We closed on time (Jan 23) and arrived at our new home Feb 14.