(This post was originally written on Monday, July 30, 2012 at 11:08pm – see the intro post for more details…)
You know that old saying, “Anything that can go wrong, will…”?
That was my day today.
As you may recall from my post earlier today, this morning my wife and I were supposed to sign the final documents to purchase our new house. I say supposed to because, well, instead of signing everything at 11:00am, we actually just finished signing them at about 9:30pm!
Only 11 hours late, right?!
I was literally getting in my car to go to the signing when my phone rang with those ominous words, “We have a problem…” As I listened to someone from the mortgage company explain the nitty gritty, pretty much my worst fears unfolded before me – in fact, they had screwed up some numbers on the closing statement … to the tune of nearly $3,000 … which we didn’t have, mind you … and so now my guess of how we were going to resolve the whole mess was pretty much as good as yours…
Well, luckily it seems that we managed to make a pretty good choice in selecting our mortgage company because they really came together to help us solve the problem. I mean, by now they’ve seen every intimate detail about our finances that exists, so more than anybody they knew that we didn’t have any more money, either, and so they were kinda forced with coming up with some other way of covering the difference or letting the deal fall through.
Thankfully, they did the former by basically splitting the difference of the excess with us – they gave us an invoice credit for part and we paid a little more out of pocket, which unfortunately pretty much sapped us completely dry, but at least we got a house out of it!
For those curious, the details were two-fold – 1) there were a couple of document stamps that are normally paid by the seller, however in the case of a foreclosure like ours, the bank refused to pay so we were stuck with them … our mortgage company overlooked this; 2) they also slipped when estimating taxes and quoted us figures for something like 3 months instead of 11 months … pretty big difference!
Anyways, again, I’m just grateful that they were still willing to step up and do what was right to finish this thing off, and as Sara pointed out on account of the ridiculous interest one pays over the life of a home loan, it probably wasn’t too big of an impact to their bottom line for them to eat the $1,500 credit, either! So that whole thing took the better part of the day to sort out, then we had to coordinate with the closing agent to meet with a notary to sign all of the documents, and it was finally just after 8:00pm at a nearby Wendy’s when we sat down at the table with a nice, older man who came bearing several hundred pages of paperwork for us to sign, and without even stopping to enjoy a cool chocolate Frosty, sign all of that paperwork we certainly did.
Now we’re told we should just have to wait a couple more days for the paperwork to all be verified, along with our closing funds and so forth, before we get our keys and it’s officially official, but in the meantime we’ve still got this pretty big stack of legal documents that more or less says…
…WE JUST BOUGHT OUR FIRST HOUSE!!!!!