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

10/29/2026

A lot of Air Force reservists have a stack of orders and assume they qualify for a VA loan.

Some do.

Some don’t, and the reason usually surprises them.

The VA gives reservists two paths.

→ 90 consecutive days of non-training active duty on one set of orders

→ Six creditable years in the Selected Reserve, with at least 50 points each anniversary year

Annual tour, BMT, and tech school are training, so they don’t count toward the 90 days.

Two 60-day tours don’t combine into 120 days either.

On the six-year side, your PCARS shows which years cleared 50 points.

IMA years count.

Participating IRR years don’t, even if you’re still earning points.

And if you’re past 90 days on a current tour, you may already be eligible with your AROWS-R orders and a Statement of Service.

I wrote up both paths, the documents for each, and where reservists get tripped up.

Full breakdown at the link.

What were you told about your VA loan eligibility that you’re still not sure about?

Air Force Reserve VA loan eligibility explained: 90 consecutive days or six creditable years, PCARS, IMAs, AROWS-R orders and the documents you need.

10/22/2026

Getting your paperwork together before your six-year mark in the Army Reserve doesn’t help.

The statement of service has to show six creditable years.

One signed before you reach the mark won’t do the job.

Many Army Reserve soldiers also don’t realize they can use a VA loan while still drilling.

You qualify one of two ways:

→ Six creditable years in the Selected Reserve
→ At least 90 days of non-training active duty

A creditable year means 50 retirement points.

So the useful work before your six-year mark is checking your points summary in IPPS-A.

If a year comes up short, you want to find out while there’s still time to do something about it with your unit.

Not after you’re under contract on a house.

I put the full breakdown on my blog, including what to show the VA for your certificate of eligibility.

Are you tracking your creditable years?

Can Army Reserve get a VA loan? Yes. See how six creditable years or 90 days of non-training active duty qualify, and what to show the VA.

10/15/2026

Many Reservists are told they have to deploy before they can use a VA loan.

That isn't how the rule reads.

A Reserve member can qualify with six creditable years in the Selected Reserve.

They can also qualify with 90 days of non-training active duty.

A creditable year generally means at least 50 retirement points.

15 of those come automatically from membership, and the rest come from drills and annual training.

Two things trip members up.

→ Drill weekends and annual training build toward the six years, but they don't count toward the 90-day path.

→ Time in the Individual Ready Reserve doesn't count toward the six.

Your points statement shows where each year landed, so I recommend pulling it before you assume either way.

I wrote up both paths, the discharge rules, and the documents you'll need for your Certificate of Eligibility.

The full breakdown is on my website.

Reserves VA loan requirements explained: the six-year Selected Reserve rule, the 90-day active duty path, discharge status and the documents you need.

10/01/2026

VA publishes a homebuyer guide, and the section on renovation loans has a line in it you rarely see from a government agency.

It tells veterans that not many lenders have experience with these loans, and that you should shop around.

That's VA saying the hard part isn't qualifying.

It's finding someone who will actually do the loan.

A veteran going through my VA loan course asked me about renovation loans, so I went and did the research instead of answering him from memory.

Two things stood out.

→ Most of what gets published about this product traces back to a VA circular that was rescinded in 2020.

→ The limits that decide whether your project works are usually the lender's, not VA's.

Program caps I looked at ran between $50,000 and $75,000, and at least one program requires the home to be habitable at closing.

VA's own rules set neither of those.

If you're looking at a house that needs $40,000 of work, knowing which rule came from where is most of the battle.

I wrote the whole thing up in this blog post, including how the as-completed value works and what happens when the appraisal comes in low.

A VA renovation loan finances repairs into your mortgage using the home's value after the work. Here is what VA requires and who will fund it.

09/24/2026

A General discharge under honorable conditions qualifies for a VA home loan.

Federal regulation makes that characterization binding on VA, which means the department cannot review it or overturn it.

The confusion usually starts with education benefits, since the Post-9/11 GI Bill does require an honorable discharge.

So a veteran hears that their discharge cost them the GI Bill and reasonably assumes it cost them everything else.

One benefit was affected. The home loan benefit was not.

An other than honorable discharge is a different situation, and the answer there is not automatic in either direction.

VA reviews the whole record and decides, and a rule change in June 2024 widened what it will weigh.

Two things worth knowing if that is your situation:

→ A long AWOL is a statutory bar that still carries an exception.

→ A bad conduct discharge from a special court-martial gets reviewed, while one from a general court-martial does not.

And if someone at a call center told you your discharge disqualifies you, that was never their call to make. VA issues the Certificate of Eligibility, not your lender.

I broke the whole thing down on the blog, including which bars have an exception and which do not.

Can you get a VA loan with an other than honorable discharge? Sometimes. A General discharge qualifies in most cases. Here's how VA decides the rest.

09/22/2026

Keys in hand, a week ahead of schedule.

Congratulations to this US Air Force veteran and his family on closing their home in Layton, Utah.

Their agent fought hard for them during negotiations and got the seller to cover closing costs and put on a brand new roof.

We put those seller-paid closing costs to work two ways:

→ Every one of their closing costs was covered

→ The rest went toward a 1-0 buydown, which drops their interest rate by a full percent for the first year

They also received a $2,500 grant from the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs.

But the part I keep thinking about has nothing to do with the numbers.

This move cuts his commute by 90 minutes a day.

That's seven and a half hours a week he gets back with his family.

Dinner at the table, bedtime stories, weekends that don't start with being worn out from the drive.

You can't put a price on that kind of time.

Proud to have helped them get there, and grateful to the agent who went to bat for them every step of the way.

Welcome home.

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?