Note: I'm using the Internet tube to publish a bunch of articles written for newsletters that never appeared in newsletters. This is one of them, written in summer 2009.
I’ve told Brea a number of times that we might very well never move again. Part of that is because we really like the house and part of it is because we’re sick of moving, but much of it is because we never want to have to go through the mortgage process again.
To say the process was a nightmare would be putting it lightly. There were times where we thought buying the house wasn’t going to happen, and most of these times were just a few days before we were supposed to close.
From the very beginning of the process — from being preapproved before actually looking at houses — our mortgage broker at Windermere kept assuring us that everything looked great. These assurances continued until just days before our scheduled July 31 closing.
On July 28 (my birthday), we got a call from the mortgage broker that our mortgage didn’t clear underwriting and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to make it work (happy birthday!). We were, understandably, crushed and dumbfounded by this. After the initial shock wore off we simultaneously tried to figure out how we were going to salvage this, plus how we were going to have someplace to live the next month, since the lease on the house we were renting was running out.
In a nutshell, underwriting wasn’t allowing any of my income to count because I don’t have a traditional full-time job and also wasn’t counting any of our income from being foster parents because we hadn’t been doing it for at least two years. (We’ve since been told these are pretty common underwriting rules and that our broker should have known about them, especially since he’s been in the business for 10 years.)
Eventually we got everything worked out and closed a week late, but it was a pretty tense week. The landlord for our rental house was fine with us staying there longer than anticipated, but otherwise it was very stressful — all we could think about was whether everything would work out, and we were never sure whether to be excited or afraid when the phone rang and the caller ID said “Windermere.”
In the aftermath of all of this, we’ve been told by people who know about such things that we experienced the stingiest underwriting they’d ever seen. It all worked out, though, and we’re very glad to be in our new (and perhaps last) home.
I’ve told Brea a number of times that we might very well never move again. Part of that is because we really like the house and part of it is because we’re sick of moving, but much of it is because we never want to have to go through the mortgage process again.
To say the process was a nightmare would be putting it lightly. There were times where we thought buying the house wasn’t going to happen, and most of these times were just a few days before we were supposed to close.
From the very beginning of the process — from being preapproved before actually looking at houses — our mortgage broker at Windermere kept assuring us that everything looked great. These assurances continued until just days before our scheduled July 31 closing.
On July 28 (my birthday), we got a call from the mortgage broker that our mortgage didn’t clear underwriting and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to make it work (happy birthday!). We were, understandably, crushed and dumbfounded by this. After the initial shock wore off we simultaneously tried to figure out how we were going to salvage this, plus how we were going to have someplace to live the next month, since the lease on the house we were renting was running out.
In a nutshell, underwriting wasn’t allowing any of my income to count because I don’t have a traditional full-time job and also wasn’t counting any of our income from being foster parents because we hadn’t been doing it for at least two years. (We’ve since been told these are pretty common underwriting rules and that our broker should have known about them, especially since he’s been in the business for 10 years.)
Eventually we got everything worked out and closed a week late, but it was a pretty tense week. The landlord for our rental house was fine with us staying there longer than anticipated, but otherwise it was very stressful — all we could think about was whether everything would work out, and we were never sure whether to be excited or afraid when the phone rang and the caller ID said “Windermere.”
In the aftermath of all of this, we’ve been told by people who know about such things that we experienced the stingiest underwriting they’d ever seen. It all worked out, though, and we’re very glad to be in our new (and perhaps last) home.
No comments:
Post a Comment