It's been a loooooooong time since I've posted anything, mostly because there no longer seemed to be much point in writing about a process that seemed to be made up of nothing more than endless waiting.
But we finally completed the process of buying our first home. Thank goodness.
Here are the numbers:
331 The number of days from when we placed an offer on our new home to when we closed
13 The number of months from when we started looking for houses to when we actually bought one
947,281 The number of times we considered giving up altogether
1,360 The number of dollars that almost derailed the entire deal
In sum: This process took forever. It was annoying, frustrating, agonizing, and horrible. But we got the house we wanted, for the price we wanted, and thanks to the long wait, it's worth a lot more than we paid for it already. All in all, a good situation.
So here's what's been going on:
As of Christmas time, we were still waiting for the seller's two banks to approve the sale price for our short sale. By February, both banks had given approval, but they didn't agree about who got how much money. Bank A wanted to give Bank B $2,040. Bank B would not accept less than $3,400. So they commenced haggling. Over $1,360. Apparently the nation's banks are so hard up that they have to worry about $1,360.
Anyway, come April, we and the sellers were both saying, "Fine, we'll pay the difference!" So the banks said, "Okay, you have exactly 2 weeks to close before this approval expires." For 11 months, we waited. And waited. And waited. All of a sudden, we had to MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!
So we contacted our lender. We got an appraisal and mortgage approval in record time. We were good to go. On Tuesday of this week, our agent called and said, "Ok, we are closing on Thursday at 9 AM. You have to pay the $1,360 at closing. But we're good." Fine. Great! Let's close. Twenty minutes later, she called back: "Your lender says you can't pay the $1,360 because otherwise they'd have to redo the loan approval."
So the day before closing we were at a point where the second lender refused to close unless they got $1,360. Both us and the sellers were willing to pay the money. And neither of us was ALLOWED to.
To make a long story short (not that that's possible at this point), our agent and the seller's agent had to agree to deduct the money from their commissions in order to close the sale. So thank God we had some pretty amazing people on our side.
But wait! Of course it can't be that simple. There was still the matter of the HUD, which had to be approved by our lender, and both of the seller's banks. As of 5 pm the day before closing, we were still waiting on the seller's second bank to approve.
9 am rolled around. We drove to the attorney's office, still not certain the closing was going to happen. (The sellers, who had relocated to a neighboring state, had driven through the night to get there, so they had it way worse.)
At 9:30, halfway through signing the papers, the final approval came through. I don't think I've ever been so relieved in my life!
So now we are homeowners.
God help us both.
