When you're getting ready to buy your first home, you need to be really careful. Any mistakes that you make right now can throw you way off track. Because you're getting ready to take out a large loan — probably one of the largest loans of your life — you need to get the best terms possible on that loan. As you'll remember from earlier in this book, monthly payments are a function of just a few ingredients: your interest rate, the loan amount, and the amount of time over which you will repay the loan. If something goes wrong when you're getting the loan, your interest rate could go up. If that happens, your monthly payments will rise, and you might even price yourself out of the market. If you don't get the best interest rate you can get, you may end up paying thousands of extra dollars in interest over the life of your loan.