Mortgage Myths & Common Mistakes

“You need twenty percent down.” Delivered at a family dinner, with total confidence, by somebody who last bought a house when a mortgage application came with a fax cover sheet.

Mortgage folklore travels well. It gets repeated, it picks up authority on the way, and by the time it lands on you it doesn’t sound like an opinion anymore — it sounds like a rule everybody already knows and you somehow missed.

So we take them apart one at a time. You have to be debt-free first (no). Checking your rate wrecks your credit (not the way you think). Renting is throwing money away (sometimes, sometimes the opposite, and the difference is arithmetic, not attitude). Your bank will treat you better because you’ve been with them since college (they have never once mentioned you in a meeting).

This is for anyone who’s been told what they can’t do and would like a second opinion — first-time buyers running on inherited assumptions, and repeat buyers whose last purchase was long enough ago that the rules genuinely moved underneath them.

Alongside the myths, the mistakes: the ones that cost money, the ones that cost the house, and the ones people don’t spot until they’re reading their closing paperwork and something doesn’t add up. Most of them are small, boring, and completely avoidable if somebody mentions them in time. That’s the whole job.

Mortgage advice ages like milk and gets handed around like a family recipe. Nobody’s lying to you. They’re just quoting a market that stopped existing.

Nobody should lose a house in Sandy or St. George to a rule that hasn’t been true since 2009.

Featured