Should You Get A Conventional or FHA Loan?

In the State of Florida Conventional loans require at least 5% down, it has to be a primary single family detached home, you have to have credit scores above 720 (preferably above 740), 2 months of reserves, and a maximum debt to income ratio of 41%, but if you do it might just be your best option. 

The reason I say that is because FHA has a one time upfront mortgage insurance premium charge of 2.25% of your loan amount.  It gets rolled into the loan amount but it is a charge nonetheless.  The factor for the monthly mortgage insurance is a little less with FHA on a loan with 5% down. 

You can find a very good example of what I am talking about at http://mgic.com/education/mi_better_option.html.  MGIC, who is one of the mortgage insurance companies that will insure loans above 80% loan to value, also has an “MI Options Calculator” that can be found here https://calculators.emagic.com/Calculators/servlet.  Hopefully your Mortgage Professional does this for you but just in case I wanted you to have the resources needed to do it.