Now that I had found my home I had to find someway to get it financed. this home was around maybe 60,000? without land, maybe a little more. unsure. but the strange thing that I had to realize about mobile / manufactured homes is that they are a home without land..lol - So here I am wanting this HUGE home and had no clue I had to find somewhere to put it and the cost was only for the house not set-up, delivery, clearing land, etc….

So I go into the office and they act like its no problem to get financed. I had NEVER had a home and NEVER had to pay on anything more than 1yr. I had lived in apartments and never had any real bills.

The woman in the office was very.. NEW. she did not know everything but knew enough to get me started. She had two huge binders. One binder had locations of land, the other had phone numbers and locations of finance companies…

First she went through the process of evaluating my credit. As I said before I did not have any credit so they gave me a list of things to get to give to the finance companies. these things are listed below:

1. Recent Bank Statements
2. Two Recent Check Stubbs
3. A letter from my landlord and used car dealership
where I purchased my car showing that I paid on time.
4. a downpayment of $1500

These things were not hard to obtain except the last one..lol - I did not have any money, well, not like that. I worked paycheck to paycheck and had to figure out how I was going to come up with that kind of money.

What I ended up doing was taking my 90 toyota celica to a titlepawn place that gave me $1500 for my title and of course I had to pay it back.

The entire loan process took maybe 2 weeks. It was very fast. I had a loan amount of 80,000 in no time. I was amazed!!! I was like how can I obtain a loan of this magnitude when I could not even get a JCPENNY’s card…

I know now that the type of loans they get are Chattel loans or personal property type loans. they are not really considered real estate loans. So thats why the dealers there usually will tell you its no problem to get you financed.

Once - preapproved for that amount I then had to find out where I wanted my house located. hmmm. This was a tough one. I lived in the city but the city does not have land like that. and the land I looked at was around $22000 for less than 1 acre of land. I ended up going further out into the country where I found an older lady who had bought tons of acres, cleared them all off, and had them set up for manufactured homes. This was a lifesaver. No clearing costs and land was nice and level. She only wanted $15000 for not 1 not 2 but 3 and a half acres of land. If you have ever seen one acre then you know how much land this is. It was really TOO much land for me, but I didn’t care.. yet..

After the loan went through they had to get more because of the entire process of setup, delivery, septic tank, drilling a well, and putting electricity out there. They explained that the house is built first in a factory, then they take it to the location. My total loan came out to be around 98,000. which was at the time a lot for me. but it really would have been even more if the land had to be cleared. Keep in mind these figures are based off of land and home prices in 2000. so don’t go out trying to find land at $15000 for three acres. now those values are around $20000 to $25000 for the location I’m at for 3 acres, and thats the minimum. Usually the rates are higher depending on location.