At the least, you need to be pre-approved ("pre-qualification" rightfully means nothing) by a trustworthy, ethical, competent lender based upon a detailed review of your qualifications and your on-line credit report or credit score.

What you can qualify for and what you feel you can afford are separate issues. The risk of looking at homes before you have answers to both of those questions is that you will expose yourself to homes whose market values are above your comfort level or your qualification level, whichever applies. When you do that, you create a situation in which what you can qualify for or afford looks unattractive by virtue of an unreasonable comparison. Who needs that stress? Not you... not me... Give us both a break!

So... I strongly recommend this approach to FINANCING:

Determine your credit score by visiting www.myfico.com. The basic credit score report is $12.95, and can usually be viewed immediately, online. If your score is below 700, you may encounter problems or limitations in obtaining financing. If it's over 800, you're golden.

Contact as many lenders as you please. Ask each of them to provide you with an "example GFE" ( a good-faith estimate of settlement costs) for a loan amount close to what you expect to borrow.

Be sure to contact (better yet, start with) Dawn Davis, at Rate One Mortgage (dawn@rate1mortgage.com). Unless you have access to truly "special money" from another source, you need look no further.

Select a lender based on your impressions, their responsiveness, availability of programs (types of loans) which meet your needs, and then their rates (which rarely differ significantly between similar programs). If you find any loan originators whose deals seem too good to be true... they probably are, which is why you should not believe anything you don't see on an "example GFE".

Before offering to purchase any home, you should make a formal application to your choice of lenders.

While I do not wish to know the most you can qualify for, and believe that your interests are best served by direct contact with competent loan originators, I am knowledgeable about loan programs (I taught Financing to rookie agents at one time) and would be happy to share my knowledge (and prejudices - I favor alternatives to long-term fixed-rate programs) with you.