When you are about to go from a lower payment or no payment on your housing to a higher payment, I recommend taking some steps to avoid running into problems with payment shock.
These steps can have 3 primary benefits:
Easing Your Transition
These steps can make the transition of lower/no payments to higher payments much easier, having a positive impact on your ability to not experience late payments/missed payments when you have a higher payment required.
Expediting Debt Pay Down & Savings Boost
Boosting Your Lender's Perception
Here are the steps that I recommend:
Establish At Least 1 Free Savings Account At a Separate Institution
Ideally the new savings account would include the following elements:
Free to keep open with no minimum balance or a low minimum balance.
Free ACH transfers to your other accounts or another means of free transfers to other accounts.
High interest rates (i.e. >5%)
If you plan on funding an account with at least $1k and never going below $1k in the account, you might like https://www.cfg.bank/personal-banking/personal-deposit-rates/ with current APY on their money market account of 5.02%.
If you won't be funding the account with at least $1k, Synchrony Bank's 4% APY isn't bad:
https://www.synchronybank.com/banking/high-yield-savings/?UISCode=0000000
How Much to Fund Savings Account
How to Get Funds to Disburse Automatically to Your New Account with Your Paycheck
Separate Accounts for Other Recurring Expenses