Bank Statements for Your Mortgage: How to Get Them Right

Transcript

Lightly edited from the video for readability.

One of the most difficult documents it seems to get correctly from clients are bank statements. Different banks do things different ways. Sometimes they mail statements. Sometimes they put them online. It's not always easy to find your bank statements because most people don't really look at them unless they need them for this process.

It's really important for you to be able to get us bank statements the way we need them and that would be every single page. So if it's page 1 through 5 on the bottom of the document, even if the 5th page looks blank, we need that 1 too. You can go online and download your bank statements. You can call your bank. A lot of times they'll fax them directly to us.

But for most loans, we need 60 days worth of bank statements to prove that you have the money in your account that you need. Throughout the process, when we have 60 days worth of bank statements, there are a lot of times that there are other transactions later on that need to be proven. One of those would be the deposit that you make on a house called the earnest money deposit. When that deposit clears, it may not be on your most recent statement, so we may need some activity printout from the day the last statement ended through that check clearing out of your account to make sure no new cash or nothing funny happened in between there. That's sometimes difficult to find.

We're going to walk through what you need to do to get that document online. A lot of times, we have our bank statements we need, the 60 days worth, but then there's some sort of transaction later on that we need to prove. It might be a deposit of a new paycheck or an earnest money deposit check, the check that you write to the seller of a house to guarantee the contract. And that needs to get proven that it's cleared and sometimes there's a gap between when your statement ended and when that when that went out and it's not on an official monthly statement yet. So what we need to prove is that there's nothing funny that happened in that meantime between your last statement ending and that deposit clearing and so we need an activity history.

Most banks, if you go online, you can view your activity history and you can sort by date. So you'll want to enter the date that your last statement ended and the date that that check cleared out. Then what you're going want to make sure you do is you find the print button within those settings. If you just hit the normal print button for your browser, it's going to print out the entire site instead of just the activity. So you're going to want to make sure you find that button.

Now when you do go into print, headers and footers need to be enabled in your print settings so that the URL shows correctly so the underwriter can track back that bank account to that website. You're also going to want to make sure that it says your name, the last 4 of your account number, and the bank name on the printout so that the underwriter can tie that all together. Really when it comes down to it, this can be a difficult process for some people and we are here to help. So if there's anything we can do to make any of these document processes easier, please give us a call. We're here to help you purchase with confidence and refinance with ease.