If you are considering buying a home there are tons of websites and mortgage tools offering you advice. While each person has a different situation due to their perspective and experience in home buying some general dos and don’ts apply to everyone looking to buy a home.

First, you should definitely protect your credit by making your debt payments, such as loans and credit cards, on time. Each of these payments go into your credit score a lender looks at which, in turn, determines how good of a loan you get or if you get one at all. If you do have to miss a payment miss the credit card first because credit-scoring systems look at the performance of similar loans first when deciding what type of score to assign.

Secondly, think about the benefit of paying off your consumer debt, even if it means a smaller down payment. The reasoning behind this is you’ll have a higher mortgage payment at lower interest rates, rather than high-interest rate credit cards to pay in addition to your mortgage. However, if you don’t have a lot of debt do save as much as possible to increase your down payment. If you can, set up a monthly direct deposit into an account to save the money for your down payment.

Don’t make any big purchases in the months leading up to your mortgage inquiry. Besides the obvious fact that it makes less money available for the down payment, it might require you to get another loan, which won’t look good to either the mortgage lender’s credit scoring systems or the human underwriter.

Make sure you can afford the loan you want. If the new mortgage payment is going to stretch your budget too much then rethink it. Generally real estate agents will show you houses that are at the maximum of what you can afford. Even though you may be tempted consider how much of your living expenses will suffer with a larger mortgage.

Finally, do get pre-approved for your mortgage and not just pre-qualified. There is a big difference between the two and the pre-approval is much closer to obtaining a loan and locking in a rate and term.