The Call is Coming From Inside the House
There’s a particular move people make when they’re thinking about buying a house. They don’t apply. They don’t call a lender. They don’t ask the question. They just decide they can’t.
Why bother? Why put in all that effort, why feel that naked, only to have someone tell you you’re crazy for trying, right? So instead, they decide no sensible person would approve them for anything legal, and they punt.
They decide they just can’t.
I call that self-rejection. It protects your ego, but it does absolutely nothing for your plans.
Self-rejecting is the financial equivalent of hearing something unsettling and running upstairs instead of out the door.
A Quick Story
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a couple who are selling their house. We were talking about what comes next and whether, given the market, it might actually make sense for them to buy again.
She immediately said, “We don’t have enough money to put down.”
He said, “Yeah, we do.”
“For what kind of house?”
“For this kind of house.”
She looked at him like he had completely lost his mind. “Don’t you need, like, 50% down to do that?”
No. For what they wanted to accomplish, there was a path that could involve putting down as little as 3.5%.
She stared at me. “What? That’s what’s wrong with this country!”
Which is still one of my favorite reactions to discovering you might be able to buy a house.
But here’s the important part: she had already told herself no. Many times, and long ago. By now, it was simply fact.
Or was it?
Had a lender reviewed their finances and said they couldn’t buy? No. Did they have zero cash on hand? No. Is it a good idea for them to buy right now? Yes. No. Maybe. Unknown.
Somewhere along the way, she had absorbed an idea about what buying that kind of house required and stopped treating it like an assumption. It became a rule.
It wasn’t.
Don’t Tell Yourself No When No One Else Has
There are all kinds of reasons people assume they’re out before they’ve ever actually entered the conversation.
Maybe the IRS thinks you only make $40,000 a year, but your bank account tells another story.
Maybe you have cash on hand, but you don’t want to tie all of it up in your house.
Maybe you’ve managed to save all the money you need while maintaining your life, but somewhere along the way your credit took a beating. You leveraged credit to do it.
Maybe you looked at your credit score two years ago and decided buying was off the table indefinitely.
Maybe somebody told you what you “need” for a down payment, and you never questioned it.
Some of those things may create real limitations. Some may change which loan works. Some may mean you need ten months and a plan instead of a house next Tuesday. And sometimes the answer really is not yet.
But not yet is useful information. A no you invented yourself isn’t.
Let’s explore one area where you may be telling yourself no now, when it no longer makes sense.
Credit is Changing, Too
This is actually an interesting week to talk about this because the way mortgage lenders are allowed to evaluate credit is changing.
For decades, mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have largely relied on what’s known as Classic FICO. That meant it became challenging or impossible to secure a traditional mortgage if your credit score got much below 640.
I can buy with a 640 credit score?! Yes. See what I mean.
Oof. I don’t have credit/mine is worse? Keep reading.
Approved lenders can now also use a new credit score called VantageScore 4.0 for eligible loans. Classic FICO remains available, and lenders aren’t required to use VantageScore.
Here’s a Little Why, For Those of You Asking
Don’t care? Skip to the Big Stick part below.
Fun Fact #1: FICO stands for Fair Isaac Corporation—the private company that created the scoring model.
A credit score is not some universal measurement of whether you are a responsible person. It’s a model designed to help a lender predict risk based on the information that makes it into your credit file.
And what makes it into that file—and how a model reads it—matters.
Fun Fact #2: A person can be financially responsible and still have a thin or unimpressive FICO score simply because they haven’t participated much in the particular credit ecosystem the model observes.
Classic FICO generally needs a consumer to have had a reported account open for at least six months, with recent reporting. That can leave some people with perfectly real financial histories but thin or dormant traditional credit files harder to score.
Fun Fact #3: Because of the way the model works, someone could be making every required payment exactly as agreed, have no delinquencies, and still have an unimpressive FICO score because their only revolving account carries a substantial balance relative to its credit limit.
This is where VantageScore 4.0 gets interesting. The new score can rate some of those consumers left out or undervalued by FICO. VantageScore 4.0 also uses trended information, looking at how credit behavior changes over time rather than only taking a snapshot.
Think of it as an adjusted score for the individual vs. grading on a curve.
It can also consider things like rent, utility and telecom payments when those payments are actually reported to the credit bureaus. That distinction matters. Paying Entergy faithfully for 20 years does not magically appear in a scoring model if nobody reports it.
Interesting, right?
There’s a much deeper rabbit hole here involving scoring models, reporting requirements and what information lenders actually use. We do not need to crawl all the way down it today. The useful takeaway is much simpler: the next time you decide, I can’t buy because I don’t have credit, you could go down that rabbit hole.
Or you could give us a call and let us loop in an expert who does this every day.
Grab the Biggest Stick You Can Find
Buying a house right now is not frictionless. Rates matter. Insurance matters. Income matters. Debt matters. Credit matters. Cash matters. The house itself matters.
But the trick is that every single one of those boxes does not necessarily have to be ticked A++ for you to purchase property.
We’re not promising the monsters disappear. We’re saying the monsters are made out of organic material, and you stand a fighting chance.
Thus, if you ever find yourself being chased through the woods and you can’t run and you can’t hide, we recommend grabbing the biggest stick you can find.
In the game of borrowing money to purchase a home, there may be several big sticks within reach.
Maybe it’s improving your credit, and we connect you with someone who can tell you the shortest path to do so. Maybe it’s having your credit evaluated differently under a scoring model your lender can actually use. Maybe it’s a different loan product, better tailored to meet you where you are.
Maybe it’s keeping more cash on hand—or invested in the market—instead of putting all of it into the house. Maybe it’s asking the seller to help with closing costs. Yes, that’s a thing.
Maybe it’s reconsidering the house you want forever and finding the house that helps you get to that one.
The point is, there is always a trick. Not a loophole. A next move.
Sometimes that move is, Yes. This one. Sometimes it’s, Yes, and it’s going to take ten months. Sometimes it’s, Yes, but getting there probably means trading that flashy truck for something more modest. Sometimes it’s simply, Not yet.
There are sticks. Grab one.
How? Avoid going down that path and searching alone. One of the above may sound good, but it might not be the best move. Instead, talk to somebody who knows which tools are available—and, just as importantly, someone who wants to understand you before deciding which one you need.
Something is Waking Up
At the time I’m writing this, in mid-October 2026, something interesting is happening.
About a month and a half ago, I told another real estate agent that the market seemed like it was trying to tell us something that hadn’t shown up in the reporting yet. Last week, he called me and said, essentially, What is happening? I’m suddenly getting all these buyer calls.
And I said, “It almost feels like Thriller. They’re all coming up out of the grave.”
I don’t think buyers suddenly learned some secret the rest of the country missed. I think some of them are simply tired of waiting for everything to become perfect.
They know another headline will come. Another rate announcement. Another insurance story. Another economic report. Another perfectly legitimate reason somebody can hand them to wait.
And eventually you get to:
Enough. I want to know what’s actually possible for me.
That is a very different question from Is this the perfect time to buy a house? And frankly, it’s a much more useful one.
Swing Away
There is, of course, one unpleasant part of finding out what’s actually possible. You have to show somebody your stuff.
Your income. Your debt. Your savings. Your credit. The weird thing on the statement. The decision you made three years ago that made perfect sense at the time and looks a little deranged in retrospect.
You have to ask someone else, Can I do this?
I once told a client that I love my lender, truly, and yet I would rather run naked through Jazz Fest than sit down and say, Here. Look at all my finances.
Weird, right? After all, my lender is a Jazz Fest enthusiast; they’d likely be in the crowd. And, last I checked, they’re also a CrossFitter. I most definitely am not. So before I streak my postpartum, badly-in-need-of-a-tan belly to the main stage, I should probably grow up and stop self-rejecting first.
The point is, it feels messy. But it doesn’t have to be. Nobody needs you to show up with the perfect financial résumé and a laminated certificate proving you have always made excellent choices with money.
The useful question isn’t, Am I somebody who can buy a house?
It’s: What would it take to get me from my current situation to the one I’d rather be in?
We can help you answer that.
Worst-case scenario? Not yet.
The good news? The call is coming from outside the house. You’re on hold. But you’re just fine.
*And yes, while I apologize for the graphic imagery above, I can assure you and myself that Jazz Fest has witnessed far scarier bellies than mine.
Celebrated for her next-level creative approach to real estate, Elisa Cool Murphy is the author of Prepped to Sell: What Works Even When the Market Doesn't. She is an award-winning, top-performing real estate broker in New Orleans and the founder and owner of Cool Murphy Real Estate.
Contact Her -
email: cool@coolmurphy.com
Facebook: @homeinneworleans
IG: @coolmurphynola
YouTube: @coolmurphynola
phone: 504-321-3194
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