If you walk into most run-of-the-mill banks and ask what you need to qualify for a mortgage, you’ll be told by a short-sighted banker, “excellent credit and a good-sized down payment, for a house in a good neighborhood that is in mint condition.” That’s because most banks and lenders want to cherry-pick their mortgage customers. That is, they want to do business only with the best of the best.

Advertising rhetoric to the contrary, most banks are not really “your neighborhood bank,” “the people’s bank,” an “easy lender,” or a place where “we love to say yes.” For the most part, they want to do business with only a very small cross-section of people. If you have bad credit, these types of banks and mortgage lenders will be useless to you.

So once you find your prospective bad credit mortgage lenders, what will they want you to have? First, despite the fact that they are willing to work with your bad credit, they still want you to have the best credit score possible, so you should be constantly trying to improve your credit rating. In addition to your FICO score, they will also take into account your debt-to-income ratio. A traditional mortgage lender will tell you that your debt payments, outside of your mortgage, should not exceed 10 percent to 15 percent of your take home pay.

Again, in the real world, not many people meet that ideal. A single credit card and a car payment alone can exceed that percentage. A bad credit mortgager will have more generous standards, but still, getting your debt-to-income ratio down is always a good idea, and you may be required to pay down some existing debt in order to qualify.

Other things that will help your case are having a stable job at which you have been employed at for at least a year, and a residence at which you have lived in for at least a year. Plus, also working in your favor, will be amassing as large a down payment as you can.

A subprime lender will not have the same stiff requirements as a conventional lender, but what’s most important is that they see a significant effort on your part to pay your bills on time, establish good credit, and maintain good financial habits.