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Mortgage guides for Indiana buyers

Five long answers to the decisions that actually change a purchase: what you can borrow, buying your first, getting approved when you work for yourself, what a pre-approval really is, and financing a rental.

Each one is written from files Dillon has closed in Hamilton County and across Indiana, and every number in them carries the source it came from, so you can check the work rather than take his word for it. The loan limit figures come from FHFA and HUD, the market numbers from MIBOR, the buyer research from the National Association of Realtors, and the program rules from IHCDA and USDA.

They're checked every quarter and dated at the top, because a page about 2026 loan limits is wrong the moment the 2027 figures land and nobody updates it. If you find something here that's gone stale, text Dillon and it gets fixed.

A guide is the long version. If your question is narrower than a whole decision, the answers section takes one question at a time, and each of those links back up to the guide it belongs to.

None of this is a substitute for a conversation about your actual file. It exists so that the conversation starts further along, with you already knowing what the words mean and what the numbers are, which is a better use of both people's time.

There is one more thing these five have in common. Each was written because the same question kept arriving by text, which means the order they sit in is not editorial judgment so much as a record of what buyers in Hamilton County actually worry about, in roughly the order they worry about it.

Nothing here quotes a rate, a payment or a down payment figure, and that is deliberate. Those numbers depend entirely on your file and on the day, and a page that prints one is either out of date or talking about somebody else. What these guides give you is the structure the numbers sit inside, which is the part that does not change week to week.