Texas First Time Home Buyers | Best Down Payment Assistance - 2026

Uh, Patriot Nation, you're going to love me after this one. I guarantee. Why? Because I'm going to show you the best down payment assistance program in Texas right now. And that's good on its surface. I'm going to couple that with a tax rebate that you can combine with this program that's going to take it from good to great and show you how to get dollar for dollar reduction in your taxes when you file for it the following year. I promise you, you're going to learn a lot and you're going to have a lot of fun and it's going to be meaningful to you. So, let's kick off this rodeo right now. Hi folks, I'm Kevin I'm the mortgage patriot on your side, nestled here in the Hill Country above San Antonio, Texas, serving all you proud Texans and all you great folks all around the country. Another great one, right? Because I'm going to talk about the best down payment program in Texas right now. And I'm going to couple that. I'm going to combine it with a tax rebate that's going to further increase your benefits and you're going to be rocking and rolling all the way down the road as you fully understand all the benefits to you in this and what I'm going to be discussing. Now, as always, please like and subscribe if you would, and you're going to find uh that it's going to help me bring this content to your forefront and bring up all my great videos. Now, I did this a very similar video back in 2024. You'll see it right here. Best down payment program in in Texas. But what happened was in 25 they changed that very program. They tinkered with it and it wasn't as good. So I couldn't recommend it. So now we're back in 2026. What did they do? They readjusted, I guess, their their parameters after maybe complaints. Who knows? And now we're back in the saddle and I can promote this program again because I it's just very dynamic. So again, watch us all the way through. Like and subscribe if you would and make comments about what you think your situation is and I can try to help you out. Let me give you the flow of this video before we get into the actual discussion. And then we're going to talk about what the program is, the name of the program, what the uh guidelines, the restrictions potentially are. We're going to talk about how it compares to other down payment programs and why I think it's better. We're going to talk about then the the combining the tax rebate uh to this program. And the last I'm going to give you an example, hardcore example. We're going to base it on a $300,000 first-time home buyer purchase. And we're going to run through the numbers. We're going to add seller concessions. They're going to show you at the end how powerful this is and how you can literally take a $300,000 house and potentially drive that cash to close number, the check you're going to write at closing down below $4,000, for example. So, here we go. So, what's the name of this program? I'll tell you what it is. It's Home Sweet Texas Loan Program. It's administered by the Texas State Affordable Housing Corporation. That's a tongue twister. And it goes by the acronym TAC. So, on the 2024 video that I talked about that I made, I talked about the TEAC program. They finally gave it a better a better name. It's Home Sweet Texas. And what does it do? Well, it gives you a choice between three different down payment assistance levels. You can choose a 2%, a 3% or 4% down payment assistance level. You're choosing basically a higher interest rate along the way. Uh but and that allows you to, you know, manage your cash to close figure. So, let's get into now the restrictions, the guidelines on this Home Sweet Texas program. Okay, so this Home Sweet Texas loan pro program is only allowed for first-time home buyers. It makes sense. How do they define that first-time home buyer? It's if you have never owned a primary home to this point in your life, then you're a first-time home buyer. Or if you have not owned a primary home in the last three years, you're a first-time home buyer. And if maybe you divorced in the last 3 years and you didn't inherit the home, you know, didn't have it in the negotiation, uh you are also have that exemption there that you are now a first-time home buyer again for that definition. So those are the three ways to be a first-time home buyer. Now, in terms of credit scores, this the uh Home Sweet Texas allows for only a 620. I say only 620 because a lot of the down payment assistance programs uh allow only for a 640 and above. So, this goes down to 620 and above, which is makes a little bit easier for you. And again, if you're even below 620, I can help you out. Increasing credit scores is not hard. It's just time and action steps. Time and action steps. I can help you with both. Now, what about uh debt to income? Well, the good news is u it's much higher on on this home sweet Texas program. In other words, the other down payment assistance programs, let's say Bear County or Harris County or Tarant County and Dallas, uh they have more restrictives. They don't allow you to have as much debt. This program allows for about 38% of your housing ratio up to about 50 and over% on your total debt to income. So your principal interest, your taxes, property taxes, property insurance, HOA dues, and your mortgage insurance all need to be about below 38%. And then adding credit cards and uh installment loans and student loans can can be as high as maybe 52 54%. Compare that to, for example, uh these other down payment assistance programs which where the ratios are much lower, maybe 33% on the housing ratio and maybe like 42% on the backend ratio. So you can buy more house with this program, which is another reason why I like it. Now, the income levels are also expanded on this Home Sweet Texas program as well. So in other words, on other DPA programs, they don't allow you to make as much money. Normally, you're restricted to about 80% of the area median income, the AMI of that area. With this Texas Suite Home Suite program, not so. Uh, you can have as much as, now there's hundreds of counties here in Texas. So, they're all based on county limits. So, just know that you can make from say a h 100,000 to 120,000 depending on what county you're in in Texas and still not exceed uh the income limits for this program as opposed to uh again other programs that you can only probably make 75 to maybe $85,000 maximum and you can't qualify then for these these other down payment assistance programs. So, that's another great benefit of the Home Sweet Texas. So, let's put some numbers to this uh before we get into the uh tax rebate, but let's just take this a simple example of a $300,000 purchase for a first-time home buyer. And again, on the on this Home Sweet Texas program, you have three choices between how much assistance you want. And the more assistance you want, the slightly higher the rate is. That's a fair trade-off in my mind. Anyway, on a if you get 2% 2% of 300,000, that's $6,000 to reduce your closing cost from. If you choose 3%, 3% of 300,000, that's $9,000 to reduce your closing cost. And of course, $4,000 would be $12,000 assistance at uh at the closing table. You'd want to pick the the place that really makes sense for you. If you can afford more cash to close out of your own pocket, then you might want to choose a better rate. But that's how it works, and it's it's makes it really simple for the client, I believe. So, let's get into the uh tax rebate right now because this can be impactful for you. You might be asking yourself, well, why doesn't everybody use this program? And this is a fair question and and let me answer that right now. Because they're going to put an artificially higher rate in exchange for giving you some amount of down payment assistance. So, for example, let's say you have a 680 credit score and the normal rate assigned to that in the marketplace if you shopped it around or I could give you the best you shopping rate. Let's say it's 5.875 today. Okay, we're at we're in April now of 2026. So, but if you choose to get 2% down uh assistance from this text home sweet Texas instead of 5.875, you're going to get about 6.25. That's your quote probably for the 2%. If you want to get 3% a little bit more down payment assistance, then the rate's going to go up to maybe 6.375. And if you want to get all 4% down payment assistance, that might go to 6.625. So, you're already starting out at a slightly higher rate than above market. That's why people would choose this program uh at all. And then as you pick more and more uh down payment assistance, you're going to get a slightly higher rate from there. So that's why it's not this program is not for everybody. If you just want this flatout best rate and go with that because you got plenty of cash to close and I can give you better seller concessions, you're not going to want this program. While I'm thinking about it, here's what you want to do right now is to go to webinar.theortepatriot.com. webinar.theortepatriot.com. Put that in. You're going to sign up for a a webinar, a first-time home buyer webinar. I'm going to take you from start to finish, from pre-approval, engaging a loan officer, engaging the realtor, looking for houses, structuring offers, negotiating the deal, things to do while you're under contract all the way to the clear to close, and eventually signing off at the closing table. It takes about 50 minutes is all. I run them on Thursdays, but again, so go to that uh that website. You'll see when the next Thursday webinar is going to be. It's about a 50-minute to an hour long. We're going to cover everything and you're going to be uh quite pleased and feel very comfortable afterwards uh knowing that you're ready to what what to do and the next steps to take to try to find your first home. Let's talk about the tax rebate uh because this is where it goes from good to great. So, the tax rebate is called the MCC program. It has to be combined with the Home Sweet Texas program. In other words, you can't obtain this MCC program by itself. What does MCC stand for? mortgage credit certification. Don't worry about what that means. Who cares? Uh, but what it does is it gives you dollar for dollar uh 15% back of all the interest you pay each year. I said a mouthful there. What do I mean? Let's say, for example, in your first year, you buy a $300,000 house. Your loan amount is about $290,000 roughly. And let's say it's at 6.25%. you're going to be paying during the year in interest only about $18,000. That's a lot of interest. The the tax rebate allows that MCC program allows you to take 15% of that number of the $18,000. That's $2,700. What does that do for you? Well, if your tax bill, let's say you're in March or coming up on April of the the following year and you have to write a check because even even though you've been paying taxes with each of your payubs, you still owe, let's say, $3,000. Well, you can take that $2,700 of the MCC program and apply it to the $3,000 tax liability and now instead of writing a check for $3,000, you write a check for only $300. That ain't bad, baby. So, that's where the power comes in on this MCC cost maybe maybe $500. There's no added interest rate or anything like that. It's just a just a form you fill out. There's a fee involved, but it's well worth the fee as you can understand. Now, let's assume that your taxes came in at only $1,000 after you've been paying all along all along the year. And you have a $2,700 MCC credit. What happens there? Well, your your tax bill goes down to zero and the remaining $1,700 is carried forward to the next tax year. So, you don't lose it and it carries forward for three years. So, that's really nice. So, let's give an example now combining everything on a $300,000 purchase. I'm going to combine seller concessions too and show you how to write a check for less than $4,000 on a $300,000 house. Let's talk about all this with the real example now and let's add seller concessions to make it very real because I always get seller concessions. Every time I represent my buyer clients, uh I get about 3% typically. So, let's take a $300,000 purchase. Let's say you take the Home Sweet uh Texas program at 3% um down payment assistance and you accept the the associated rate. Okay. So, now let's add put some numbers to this. Given a $300,000 house in Texas, the three buckets you have of closing costs are your down payment bucket, your transactional, you know, the actual closing cost bucket, and your escros and prepaid buckage. Your down payment bucket is going to be bucket number one, $300,000 times about 3.5%. That's the FHA down payment, 3 and a half%. That's $10,500. Bucket number two is your transaction cost, your processing, your title work, your underwriting fees, all those fees associated with the loan. That's going to be about $6,000. That's bucket number two. Book number three is going to be about $3,500. And that includes prepaying a full year of of insurance, 12 months of hazard insurance, property insurance, and three or four months of property taxes to put them in your escrow and a couple months of insurance put in your escrow and prepaid interest. All that is about 3500. So bucket number one, 10,500. Bucket number two, 6,000. Bucket number three, 3500. That totals $20,000 total. If you choose the 3% home sweet Texas program, that's $9,000. 3% of 300,000 is 9,000. 20,000 minus 9,000 is $11,000. Now, we're if we can get 3% seller concessions. And again, I always get at least 3% uh in this today's market anyway, that's n that's another $9,000. So, we're at $11,000 minus an additional $9,000. You're writing a check at closing for $2,000 on a $300,000 house. And remember our MCC, our tax rebate, you're getting about $2,700 to cover a potential tax liability come March or April of the next year. Incredible deal. Think it all through and let me help you with this program. One last thing, remember to go to this website, webinar.theort mortgage.com, and sign up for that Thursday evening webinar. I'm going to take you all the way through from start to finish the entire road map, pre-approval all the way to writing a check at closing. I'll answer questions. We're going to have fun. I've actually had fun in this video. So, uh, hit the like and subscribe once again and tell me anything you want to tell me. I'm Kevin Fagen, the mortgage patriot on your side. Make it a great one. END OF TRANSCRIPT