Home Buying Process
Home Buying Budget Planning
Your Roadmap to a Confident Home Purchase
Whether you’re buying for the first time or the fifth, having a clear understanding of the home buying process makes all the difference.
My comprehensive Home Buyer Overview walks you through every stage—from financing and offer strategy to inspections, closing, and beyond—so you can navigate your purchase with clarity, confidence, and fewer surprises.
Many buyers think in terms of monthly payments—not purchase prices. In this video, we walk you through three key ways to translate your monthly budget into a realistic home price, from online calculators to full pre-approval. Whether you’re just starting to explore homeownership or getting serious about making an offer, this video is for you.
What You’ll Learn in This Video:
How to estimate your buying power based on your monthly budget
The differences between mortgage calculators, prequalification, and pre-approval
When to use each approach depending on how far out you are from buying
Why pre-approval is essential before making an offer
What sellers expect to see when evaluating your offer
What’s on the market now? Customize your home search.
Ready to start the process? Schedule a brief conversation.
Adam Tabaka (00:00):
So what is your budget? Now, if you haven’t done any preliminary legwork on the topic, there’s a good chance you’re not going to be talking to me about a sales price, but a monthly budget number. So how can we translate that monthly budget to a sales price? Well, there’s three different ways that we can do that.
(00:19):
The first option is an online mortgage calculator, and these are great tools if you’re two, three, or more years out from actually looking in earnest, and you just want to kind of get some kind of rough ballpark of what you might theoretically qualify for right now.
(00:34):
The second is prequalification. And prequalification is an excellent tool to utilize when you’re 12 to 18 months out from actually purchasing a home. With prequalification, you are having a conversation with a loan officer discussing your income, your debts, and your assets, giving them a rough sense of what you think your credit rating is, and they are giving you a rough sense of if all that you tell me is true, and if everything lines up the way things are right now, this is the ballpark that you’ll be in.
(01:06):
The very best means though of translating your monthly budget to a sales price is through pre-approval. That involves going a step further with your loan officer, submitting documents that verify your income, that verify your debts, that verify the assets that you own.
(01:25):
When you’re ready to start looking at properties in earnest, when you are ready to make an offer, it’s imperative that you’ve already gone through the pre-approval process because no seller is going to take your offer seriously without a pre-approval letter from a known and reputable lender. So if it’s time to start searching in earnest for your next home, it’s time to get yourself pre-approved.
Your Roadmap to a Confident Home Purchase
Whether you’re buying for the first time or the fifth, having a clear understanding of the home buying process makes all the difference.
My comprehensive Home Buyer Overview walks you through every stage—from financing and offer strategy to inspections, closing, and beyond—so you can navigate your purchase with clarity, confidence, and fewer surprises.