Jason Skinrood at Edge Home Finance, LLC - NMLS #180306

09/02/2026

VA changed how non-medical collection accounts get counted, and it's a bigger deal than it sounds.

The old calculation used 5% of the collection balance as your monthly payment.

An $8,000 collection counted against you like a $400 a month debt.

The new calculation is 5% of the balance divided over twelve months.

That same $8,000 collection now counts as about $33.

That's roughly $367 a month back in your qualifying numbers.

On a VA loan that lands right in residual income, the money left over after your mortgage and your bills are paid.

For a veteran who came up a little short last year, that can be the whole difference.

Medical collections are handled separately and generally get disregarded, including charge-offs, as long as they haven't been reduced to a judgment or lien.

The account still gets addressed on the file, and if your credit report shows a minimum payment on the collection, that payment is what gets used.

But if a lender told you no in the last year over an old collection, the math you were measured against has changed.

Worth asking for a second look.

09/01/2026

Congratulations to a US Air Force veteran and his family who just went under contract on a home in Layton.

They found me through past clients of mine who used their own VA loan a while back, and a referral like that means a lot.

Their agent did real work at the negotiating table:

→ Closing costs paid by the seller

→ A full roof replacement

We're also setting up a temporary buydown, which will lower their payment for the first year and give them some room to settle in.

On top of that, they qualified for the $2,500 grant through the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs.

Closing costs covered, a new roof, a lower payment for year one, and $2,500 back toward the purchase.

That's what it looks like when a veteran's benefits get put to work the right way.

Excited for this family and the home they're about to move into.

Congratulations, and thank you for your service.

08/13/2026

The VA home loan benefit doesn't always end when the veteran dies.

It can pass to the surviving spouse as an entitlement in their own name, and plenty of people who qualify never find out.

The part that surprises most people: the death doesn't have to be service-connected.

If the veteran carried a total disability rating long enough beforehand, a heart attack or a car accident doesn't close the door.

The dates decide it, not the cause of death.

Three things worth knowing:

→ A rating based on individual unemployability counts, not just a schedular 100 percent
→ Surviving spouses file VA Form 26-1817, not the 26-1880 that veterans use
→ The home loan remarriage rule uses age 57, not the 55 you'll see quoted for DIC

That last one costs people.

Congress lowered the DIC remarriage age to 55 back in 2021 and left home loans at 57, and you'll see 55 repeated for both.

Surviving spouse files are uncommon, even after 1,200+ VA closings, and that's most of the problem.

If someone who's spent two decades in VA lending only sees these once in a while, the odds that whoever picked up the phone at a call center has ever worked one are low.

And a person who's never done something isn't a reliable source on whether it can be done.

That's how an eligible spouse ends up being told the benefit died with their spouse.

Surviving spouse VA loan eligibility explained: the five qualifying pathways, remarriage age rules, VA Form 26-1817, and the funding fee exemption.

07/30/2026

A lot of National Guard members never apply for a VA loan because nobody ever mobilized them.

They assume the benefit is something you earn by deploying.

It isn't, and it never was.

The most common path to VA loan eligibility for Guard members is six qualifying years in the Selected Reserve. No mobilization required. I have worked with plenty of non-prior-service members who signed a six-year contract, drilled, earned their points, separated, and bought a house without ever leaving the country.

The part that catches people goes both directions.

I worked with an Air Guard member recently who came to me sure he had qualified through Title 10 orders for a school he attended. The orders were real and they were long enough. But the duty was for training, and training does not count. His actual path was the six-year mark, which he had not hit yet.

We did not stop. He got preapproved, found a home, got it under contract, and we verified his eligibility before closing exactly as planned.

Knowing where he actually stood is what made that possible.

The reverse happens more often. Members look at a record full of stateside activations, see no deployment, and write themselves off. Meanwhile the orders sitting in their file may have already done the job.

The mission does not decide it. The order type and the length decide it.

I verify eligibility before I preapprove a Guard member. Most loan officers skip that step, and it is the one that prevents both failures I see: the member who waits years longer than necessary, and the member who goes under contract on an assumption.

If you have been sitting out because nobody ever called you up, what made you think you were not eligible?

07/23/2026

Two National Guard members can hand me the same stack of orders and get opposite answers on their VA loan.

The difference isn't the number of days served. It's the statutory authority printed on the orders, one line most loan officers never read.

I had a Guard officer who was waiting for his six-year mark because someone told him that was the requirement.

When I read his orders, he'd already qualified through active-duty service he'd completed.

He'd been holding off for no reason.

Around the same time, another member was sure he qualified because of how many orders he'd been on.

His longest stretch was training time, which doesn't count no matter how many days it ran.

His actual path was the six-year route, proven with his points summary.

Here's what trips up so many Guard files. Unlike active-duty service, Guard service doesn't verify with the VA automatically. You have to establish eligibility with your own paperwork the first time, and the wrong document, or the right one read the wrong way, stalls the whole thing.

That's why I check eligibility before I preapprove a Guard member, and why I read orders line by line instead of counting days.

If you're in the Guard and you've been told to wait, or told no, it's worth a second look at what your orders actually say.

Full breakdown of the documents you need and where to find them.

07/16/2026

A veteran who wants $40,000 out of his house is often looking at a $13,200 funding fee before a single other cost.

Here's where that comes from.

The VA cash-out funding fee is 3.30% if you've used your benefit before.

That percentage gets charged on the entire new loan, not on the cash you actually receive.

On a $400,000 home, which is roughly the national average, that's $13,200.

And that's the fee by itself, before the appraisal, the title work, the lender fees, and the prepaids that come with any full refinance.

Most veterans I talk to want $30,000 to $50,000, usually for paying off debt or fixing up the house.

So the fee alone is eating a third of what they came for.

For that amount, a home equity loan or a HELOC is usually the better tool.

It has closing costs too, but they're charged against what you actually need instead of against your whole balance, and there's no VA funding fee at all.

Your first mortgage stays right where it is.

Usually, not always. Your current rate matters, and I have a file on my desk right now where the math came out the other way.

I just rewrote my full breakdown of the VA refinance options, including when the answer is don't refinance.

07/11/2026

Falling in love with a condo before checking if it's VA-approved is one of the most heartbreaking mistakes I see VA buyers make.

Unlike single-family homes, condos require project-level VA approval. If the condo project isn't on the VA's approved list, your VA loan won't work — no matter how perfect the unit is.

Here's what to do BEFORE you fall in love:

→ Go to VA.gov and use the VA Condominium Search Tool
→ Enter the state and search for the project by name or address
→ Confirm the project is "Accepted Without Conditions" or "Accepted With Conditions" (both work)
→ Note the approval expiration date

If the project isn't on the list, you have three options:
Move on to a VA-approved condo
Ask if the HOA is willing to pursue VA approval (long process, no guarantees)
Consider a conventional loan instead
The lesson: check the list before you write an offer. Don't fall in love first.

I built a free 48-lesson VA loan course that walks through condo eligibility, the approval process, and what to look for in an approved project.

Comment "VA" and I'll send you the link.

22+ years and 1,200+ VA loans closed. Licensed in 13 states.

07/09/2026

A lot of National Guard members are sitting on the sidelines waiting to hit six years, when their orders may have already qualified them for a VA loan.

Here's what most people miss.

Since 2020, certain Title 32 service counts toward VA loan eligibility, not just the old Title 10 federal active duty.

That border mission, the COVID activation, the disaster response, a temporary AGR tour, even MEST days for Air Guard members: depending on how the orders were written, that time can count.

But there's a trap.

State Active Duty looks and feels identical to a Title 32 mission. Same disaster, same long days away from home.

It does not count, because it's state funded instead of federally funded.

The difference between service that counts and service that doesn't often comes down to one line on your orders.

I've helped Guard members become eligible with less than two years in, purely because their Title 32 orders met the requirement, after another lender told them to wait.

If you've served on Guard orders and you're not sure what you're holding, that's a short conversation, not a research project.

I wrote up the full breakdown: how Title 10 and Title 32 differ, the 90-day rules, and the paperwork that proves it.

What have you been told about when your Guard service counts?

07/08/2026

Pre-qualification and pre-approval sound alike. They're not the same thing — and confusing them can cost VA buyers the house.

The difference:

→ Pre-qualification is a conversation. You tell a lender your income, debts, and credit picture, and they estimate what you might qualify for. Nothing is verified.
→ Pre-approval is a documented process. The lender pulls your credit, verifies your income and assets, and issues a conditional approval letter based on real numbers.

Sellers know the difference. In a competitive market, an offer backed by a real pre-approval letter beats an offer backed by a pre-qual almost every time.

For VA buyers this matters even more, because some sellers still carry outdated bias against VA offers. A strong, lender-vetted pre-approval letter is one of the best ways to counter that.

If your "pre-approval" was a 10-minute phone call and no document requests, it wasn't a real pre-approval.

I built a free 48-lesson VA loan course that walks through exactly what a real VA pre-approval looks like and what to have ready.

Comment "VA" and I'll send you the link.

22+ years and 1,200+ VA loans closed. Licensed in 13 states.

07/07/2026

Two weeks. That was the window we had to close this loan.

A few weeks back I shared that one of my clients, a Marine Corps veteran, got a town home in South Jordan under contract.

To make his offer competitive, he agreed to a two-week close.

That's a tight timeline on any loan, let alone a VA purchase.

So we moved.

Every document, every deadline, every moving piece had to line up the first time, and it did.

He officially closed and has the keys.

This is the same veteran who found me online and spent months running payment scenarios with me before he ever made an offer.

He wanted out of the long Grantsville commute and back in the Salt Lake Valley so he could spend more time with his kids.

Now he's there.

The preparation we did up front is exactly why a two-week close was even possible.

You don't hit a timeline like that by hurrying at the end.

You hit it by being ready before you start.

Congratulations to a veteran who did the work and earned every bit of this.

What's something you've pulled off because you prepared for it long before the deadline?