How does Wisetack financing work?

Wisetack is the financing partner Flooring Correct works with, and our financing page names it and carries the disclosure. What that page does not do is walk you through the sequence from where you are standing, which is usually in a kitchen with an old floor and no idea which end of this to pick up first. Here it is in order, including the one step in the middle that decides whether any of the rest of it is worth much.

Before you open the form

You do not need much, and you do not need a quote. What helps is knowing roughly what you are contemplating: which rooms, whether stairs are in it, and whether this is a floor you want now or a plan you are testing. A rough square footage sharpens it further, and the flooring calculator will produce one without asking for your email.

That is genuinely all the preparation the first step takes. The rest of what you might expect to gather, the material you have settled on, the exact footage, what the subfloor needs, comes later and comes from us.

Prequalifying is a look, and it does not commit you

The application is short and it runs on Wisetack's secure site rather than ours. You fill it out online in a few minutes instead of sitting through paperwork at a counter, and prequalifying does not commit you to a loan. That sentence is worth reading twice, because the fear of being trapped by asking is what keeps most people from finding out where they stand.

Wisetack and its lending partners review it and come back to you. Whatever they can offer is theirs to state and yours to read, and accepting is a separate act from asking. Approval and eligibility are set on their side, not behind our sample rack, and why that separation is a good thing is worked through on the page on how the arrangement is set up.

The step that decides whether the number fits

Here is the part people skip, and it is the one that actually determines how this goes. A figure only means something once it is attached to a real job. An amount picked in a kitchen before anybody has looked at the subfloor is a guess, and a guess is a poor thing to build a plan around. The free in-home measure is what converts your rooms into a real number: the footage as it actually is rather than as it was sketched, the condition of whatever is hiding under the old floor, and every doorway where one material has to hand off to another.

People who do this step early tend to have a straightforward time of it, because the flooring number and the plan are talking about the same project. People who fix on an amount first sometimes find the job is smaller than they braced for, which is a good day, and sometimes find it is larger, which means revisiting the plan with a floor already chosen. What the measure covers is worth reading before you book it.

Applying first or measuring first

Either order works, and the financing page says so. The difference is what you carry into the showroom. Prequalify first and you walk in knowing what you are working with, which narrows the rack before anyone pulls a sample. Measure first and you walk into the application knowing the real size of the job, which is the sharper way round if your rooms are unusual or the subfloor is a question mark.

If you would rather not decide, do the measure. It is free, it obligates nothing, and it is the piece that everything else keys off. How to build the range you bring to either conversation is covered on the budgeting page.

If the job changes after you have a number

Projects move. You add the hallway. The dining room gets pulled out to next year. A stair goes in that was not in the original list. That is ordinary, and it is the reason to keep the two sides talking rather than treating either as locked the moment it is settled.

On the flooring side nothing is ordered until the written quote is in your hands and you have approved it, so a change before that point is just a change. On the lending side, anything about revisiting what you were shown is a question for Wisetack rather than for us, and their form is where it gets asked. Once a scope is final, ask at the showroom how any current offer lands on the quote, since what is running changes through the year.

Then it stops being a financing story

Once the quote is approved this stops being a financing story and becomes an ordinary flooring one, run in the order it always runs in, and the installation process page walks the whole of it. The only thing worth carrying across from here is that the two sides keep separate clocks. Neither waits on the other, neither is a reason to leave the other unstarted, and the one that most often stalls is the one nobody began.

Tell us which rooms and which material you are leaning toward, and we will narrow it with you at the Wentzville showroom or in your own light at home. Call 636-332-0654.