Try Lyonfinancial, they specialize in pool loans in AZ.
Here is a link to their website.
Many of my cust have been very happy with them.

Here is a link that might be useful: Lyon Financial

mommyniki,
You have described the problem that is vexing the entire pool industry and home improvement businesses in general. There are a lot of willing buyers and no lenders.
It will be necessary for buyers to forgo instant gratification and be patient and save until they can build their pool projects. Money is very tight and just good credit scores are not enough.
Sorry I can't be more positive, but the pendulum has swung from easy money to almost no money. You'd think there would be a happy medium.

I agree with most of the comments here. We have fine credit and have been in our house more than 13 mos, yet weren't able to get a pool loan for one reason or another. We've just saved so that we don't have to rely on financing, which is a good feeling. I think the instant gratification thing that has plagued Americans for so long now is finally catching up to us as evidenced by the current mortgage/lending crisis.

I'm not sure if you can but there are a ton of homes in az that are in forecloser. I live here and many of them have new pools in the back yard already. Unless your really stuck on that home it would be a lot cheaper to buy somthing where someone else has spent the money building a pool. I found a home in avondale north of I10 with a 1 year old pool pebbletech with in ground spa 2500sq home for 190k. They must have spent 35k on that pool alone. Maybe you can't sell your home.

just a pb- Thank you. We will look into that.

I would love to be able to be patient, but we have no backyard and 4 boys who are going to be aching to go outside to play in a month or two. We have to get a backyard. If we can't get the pool loan, we will just have to put in a backyard ourselves and the pool will be out for many, many years. If that is what happens, then so be it. We just want to explore all our options to see if we can figure out a way to get the pool. If not, we will put in some landscaping, get the trampoline up, and that will be our backyard.

kell- Our house actually was a foreclosure. We sold our home back in April in 2 wks. for full asking price. I really thought it was going to be easy to find a house, it wasn't. There was a specific h.s. district I wanted to be in but I couldn't find a house. We looked at some and put a bid on one, but nothing was right. We even looked at one that had never been lived in and had a pool (that was smack in the middle and wasted the yard). The house just felt wrong. The one we got is only 3 yrs. old and only had renters in it for 2 months, otherwise it was empty. They had cut the pipes and taken the cabinets off the walls (neatly I might add), taken down the lights, and cut the plugs in the kitchen. But, all those were easy fixes and we got it for a great price. One of the reasons we picked this house was because the price was so great we'd be able to get a pool and get what we wanted, in the part of the yard we wanted it in. It's just not working out that way.

Hello,

Lyon Financial, at least in Texas, requires the following:

Existing home loans + Pool loan must be no more than 90% of
the appraised value of your home + 50% of the cost of the pool

I hope this helps.

Hi Momminiki,

Hope things work out for you. Just curious, if you are able to proceed with the pool, what kind of design will you go for this time?

We will still do a freeform but it will look completely different from last time. I'm the type of person that once I have something I want something different the next time. One design we are looking at has a raised bondbeam and sheer descent. I really like the colors of gina171's pool. I usually don't like brown tile but I really like the look of it with the Majestic Plum. I may also like it because it is dark brown and not tan. We are still waiting for another pool builders design so we will see what he comes up with. We told him either sheer descent or rock waterfall, whichever we could get the most look from. We really like this builder the best, but he doesn't use PebbleTec, he uses StoneScapes, and I really have my heart set on PT Majestic Plum. But if we don't get approved it is a moot point anyway. We should find out if we get approved tomorrow. Keeping my fingers crossed.

We are in Texas, but we did not want to do a home equity loan, so we went to our local bank, and applied for a Home Improvement loan. They approved us for 35K, our pool/hot tub was 34,500, and we financed for 10 years at 7% interest. I'm sure there may be better options out there, but this was two summers ago, my husband and I are teachers, and we spend every day, all summer long in that pool! Every time my husband jumps in from mowing or doing yard work, he says that's the best money we've ever spent! As teachers, we could not afford to save up and pay cash, and we wanted our kids to be able to enjoy it now. I hope it all works out for you and your family! Keep us updated!

Well, it looks like no pool for us for a while. We tried 2 other places and no go. We did figure out one of the problems. It is one of those, why is that still showing up on our credit report-type problems. We had a mortgage for an investment that was bought by another company but it is still showing up. Two different credit unions mentioned it, but it took until the 2nd one said it that we figured it out. We told them both that it had been bought by another mortgage company but it didn't matter. One of them said that our debt to income ratio was too high and that we needed another $5000 a month income. Hello?! But if they think that we have a whole other mortgage, no wonder. We will have to get that taken care of, but it will take a while. Funny that it never came up, or wasn't an issue, when we were doing the financing for our new home. Now we need to figure out how to progress. We need to do something back there.

another option would be to scale the pool to what you can afford monthly for the 84 month loan. IMO - if you cant get a pool price that you can afford over 7 years, you're probably trying to spend too much anyway. To each their own, but who wants to pay on a pool for 10+ years? Life is full of compromises and we have a hard time learning that, hence the current credit/banking/housing problem.

We're building a pool right now and I would love to have a spa, waterfall et all, but we are putting in what gets the job done without strapping ourselves with too much debt.

We decided to forego all of the waiting and bought an above ground pool at WalMart. (about 300 bucks) Our kids didnt care, they just wanted to play and avoid the AZ heat. Good luck to y'all.