Put the truck installment on the same page as the house
The payment a credit officer will find
Bring three months of statements and circle every amount that leaves on a schedule. The truck loan is the obvious one. The motorcycle, the store card from the furniture shop, and the cash card are the ones households describe as almost finished. Almost finished still counts until the last payment has cleared.
A family loan you repay your uncle in cash every month may never appear on a bureau report. It still leaves the household. If you omit it, the monthly housing figure you tell yourself will be larger than the month you actually live.
A remainder, not a slogan
Write income at the top. Under it, the circled payments. Under those, the costs you cannot skip: rent you still pay, rice and the market, school, the remittance to parents, fuel for the truck. What remains is the room a housing installment could occupy without displacing the remittance or the truck.
Households sometimes start from a house they love and invent a monthly amount to match it. The column runs the other way. The remainder picks the price range. A lender will do a version of this arithmetic with its own ratios. Doing it at the kitchen table first means the interview is not the first time you see the truck and the house on one page.
When the column should be done in the office
If you have one loan and tidy wages, you can build this page yourself from the method above. If you have several booklets, a shop account mixed with the household, or a guarantee you signed for a sibling, the debt review is the sitting we use. We stop at four lines on the starting fee and tell you the cost of going further before we add a fifth.
The page you take home is dull on purpose. Dull numbers are the ones you can check.