ScottSevener.com

(This post was originally written on Monday, July 30, 2012 at 9:58am – see the intro post for more details…)

So this is it … in a little over an hour, my wife and I are set to start signing papers like the dickens that will ultimately result in the purchasing of our first house! I’m a little nervous, simply because there were some snarfus on Friday that meant we didn’t get to see the final settlement statement (i.e. how much $$$ we need to bring to the table!) before actually arriving at said table, so I’m really hoping that everyone remembered to cross the T’s and dot the lowercase j’s so that the numbers all work out to exactly what we’re expecting.

Mind you, we won’t actually walk away with our keys today … apparently that doesn’t really happen much at closing anymore because they want to make sure that your check clears before handing them over … but still, it’s a pretty huge step considering that it was barely 45 days ago that we even decided to officially start looking for houses in the first place!

Now without further ado … to the Scottmobile!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1mFXiIq_Tc

(This post was originally written on Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 2:58pm – see the intro post for more details…)

Two days until we’re scheduled to close now, and while I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it second thoughts, I have caught myself the last couple of days just wondering randomly if we picked the right house.

I drove by our second choice the other day and noted that it does have a little more street presence, but at the same time the layout inside leaves something to be desired. It also has a bigger backyard, but is lacking a couple of features that we probably won’t be able to afford to put in for at least another 5 years or so.

Oh yeah, and after seeing so many sets of financials for the house that we are buying, even being maybe 10% more, it’s probably well out of our price range at this point!

I’ve got to imagine that it’s probably pretty normal to have your mind wander before making such a big purchase like this … it’s weird – I didn’t really go through anything like this when I married my wife, but who knows?! Ultimately, when I do focus solely on the new house, though, I think it has a lot of potential to be a great home for us … at least for the next 5-10 years or so. I would like to see us move into something a little bigger as our eventual kids start to get older, but I suppose we’ve got a ways to go before all of that.

I think I need to find something to do to keep my idle mind occupied until Monday morning!

(This post was originally written on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)

Just turned in our 30-day notice … it’s really happening now!

…or at least it had better really be happening now because otherwise 30 days from now we’re going to be homeless…  😯

New target date for our closing is now July 31st, or 7 days from now. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but several cogs in this contraption neglected to move together in an efficient manner, so we had to bump it back a week. I think we can still work with 7/31, but anything after that is going to really start pushing it.

I’m going to own my own house in a week! 

(This post was originally written on Saturday, July 21, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)

Today Sara and I spent probably a good 2-3 hours just wandering around, between both Lowe’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond.

We’re trying our best to stay calm through another one of these damn waiting periods – this time we’re waiting for a check to show up in the mail from my 401k to fund our down payment … because even though I overnighted the paperwork to them, heaven forbid they overnight the funds back to me!

But I don’t want to rant about that right now…  😉

It’s kind of fun to plan for our future like this, though, so we spent hours wandering just about every single aisle in each store, speculating about the things that we need and the things that we’ve already talked about doing around our new house in the future. Some of them are relatively small and will likely get done right away, like adding a couple of extra ceiling fans and sprucing some things up in the kitchen, while others will have to wait until next year and possibly beyond … we’d like to redo the garden in the front and even replace a tree with something a little more tropical, for example, but that’ll be at least springtime, depending on costs and whatnot…

But it’s nice to have a fresh look on everything and be able to talk about these kinds of things that have always been off-limits while we’ve been renting all of these years. I mean, sure, we could’ve redone the garden at our current house, but that’s not exactly something that you can take with you when you leave and at the end of the day, why should I spend a bunch of money out of my own pocket to spruce up somebody else’s investment??? That one was honestly an idea that I’d been entertaining for a while, but we never quite had the extra cash lying around anyways … but now in hindsight with all of the other drama that’s happened recently, I’m kinda glad that we didn’t go through with anything earlier because I’d be out there with a shovel and a garbage bag digging up all of my shrubs to take with us at this point!

I can tell that over the next month or so, we’re going to be spending a lot of money – not just on the house itself, but also lots of these little home improvements off the bat and also just in updating some everyday creature comforts like maybe dishes, towels, and stuff like that. And it’s kind of fun because it helps cement the fact that although we’ve certainly had several nice homes together over the last six years, this will be the first one that we’ll be able to truly call our own…  🙂

(This post was originally written on Monday, July 16, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)

I realize that I haven’t written anything about our house-buying adventures in a couple of weeks, but truth be told, there really hasn’t been a whole lot to say. Right now we’re hoping to close around the end of the month and it’s really just paperwork getting shuffled between now and then, but nonetheless, here’s a quick summary of what’s happened since last time…

• Ordered The Survey – …which is apparently a big scam in the mortgage industry because all they’re doing is verifying the property lines for the house, which has already been done two or three times before! I’m pretty sure the house hasn’t moved since it was built 7 years ago, so as far as I’m concerned, this was just an easy waste of $198 in my book.
• Shopped for Insurance – …which ended up being kinda confusing because one day I spent a lot of time talking with the guy who I figured I’d end up going with, and then a week later I was committing to another lady who spent half the time but had twice the knowledge of the first guy. It was weird, and I hope that I bought enough so that we’re covered if aliens steal the house or whatever, but we’ll see…
• Mortgage Underwriting Approved!!! – …which we actually just confirmed today and is subsequently a huge load off of our backs because that’s one of the big things that we were kind of nervous about, due to some minor credit issues that had the potential to become much bigger credit issues. Of all the random approvals that we’ve gotten over the last month, this one actually means that someone agreed to loan us the money to buy the house, so it’s a big one as far as I can tell!
• ______ The Appraisal – …which again I think is another waste product of the mortgage industry because essentially what they’re doing is inspecting the house for the bank to make sure that it’s actually worth what they’re offering to loan us. Why couldn’t they just do both the inspection and the appraisal at the same time??? Because that would’ve saved me $375, that’s why…
• Initiated the Down Payment – …which apparently I should’ve done a couple of weeks ago, but who was I to know that the information given to me by my 401k people wasn’t actually going to be accurate for what I was trying to do?! In a nutshell, we’re taking a loan from my 401k to pay for our down payment, and it was explained to me that it was really quick paperwork to fill out, and then the money could be wired to my checking account shortly thereafter. Nope! Instead, it’s now a race against the clock to hurry up get the paperwork processed and then wait by the mailbox for the actual check because they won’t wire it to me after all. Again, in hindsight this is something that I should’ve done weeks ago, but I was kind of waiting for that approval listed above before proceeding … just in case.  😳

I guess you could say that it’s been a whole lot of hurry up and wait mentality over the last couple of weeks. Here and there we’ll have a random document to sign and return, which we’ll rush to do, only then to find ourselves back to waiting while somebody somewhere “processes it.” It’s a little frustrating because all of the sense of urgency is on the buyer’s side of the table, whereas this is something that all of the other agents do every single day, so that paper in the pile that represents this huge event taking place in our lives is but another document for them to get through before their workday is over. 🙁

Anyways, I suppose that’s all for now. With any luck, hopefully about 9 days from now I’ll be posting an image of a new set of keys and the moving can finally commence!!!

(This post was originally written on Thursday, June 28, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)

Today was a good day!   😉

Did our house inspection this morning and didn’t really come up with any real points of concern, other than the faucet in the kitchen sink doesn’t seem to be getting enough water pressure. All of the other faucets and shower heads are fine, so a quick Googly search leads me to believe that hopefully this might end up being a stupid, little fix that I can actually figure out myself.

Other than that, verbally the guy told us that everything actually looks surprisingly better than a lot of the other stuff that he sees! We’ll have a few random things to replace – mailbox, a couple of ceiling fans, a tension cable for the patio screen out back – but nothing too serious, which was a real relief!

I think equally, though, it was just kinda nice to get us back in the house again, considering that we’d only walked around it for maybe 10 minutes before deciding to put in our offer, and that was almost two weeks ago! This time we could actually just wander around and take our time while the inspector dude did his thing, taking in each room and seeing how well our memories matched up to reality. It definitely seemed like in the last couple of weeks, the rooms were shrinking a bit in my mind, so it was refreshing to take another wander around the new room that will become my office and reassure myself that it won’t actually be as cramped as I had been thinking…

All in all, we were there for maybe an hour and a half – probably a little less. We left with some measurements of key areas (living room(s), bed and dresser spots in master bedroom, other room sizes), so hopefully that’ll be enough to tide us over another few weeks until we’re actually ready to close and start moving in! It’s really both exciting and nerve-wracking, mainly because I hate all of the waiting and uncertainty, but today was one of the good days because it reaffirmed that we really feel like we’re getting something substantial for the 90+ pages of documents that we’ve signed our lives away on over the last couple of weeks!  😯

So next steps…

• Home Appraisal (ordered by the lender, so we won’t really have much to do with this, as I understand…)
• Mortgage Underwriting Approval (this is the big one, in my mind – to confirm that they’re actually going to give us the money to buy this place!)

And the waiting officially resumes!  😥

(This post was originally written on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)

So we’re NOT going with the credit union.

And it’s kinda complicated…  😛

The good news is that our other guy was able to offer us an FHA 30-year fixed loan at a slightly higher interest rate (3.750% vs. 3.625%), with only 3.5% down, and comparatively better closing costs than what the credit union was offering us.

This became another thorn in our side for the credit union because after toiling over their Good Faith Estimate to compare fees, I eventually noticed that they had a good $750 in fees that were earmarked as “not included in closing costs” … so we still had to pay them, but they were conveniently getting omitted from our calculations when we were trying to make comparisons…

Anyways, the reason why I say that it’s complicated is that technically we’re looking at a slightly higher minimum payment with these other guys than we were with the credit union, and the interest rate, too, as noted above. Sure, closing costs are a little lower, but those are a one-time thing. Plus, the credit union’s PMI was estimated as a little bit cheaper.

So why’d we ultimately decide to go with the other guy anyways???

Honestly, a lot of it was kind of just a feeling where we felt like we were going to be more comfortable with the smaller operation than with a bigger credit union. And that’s admittedly a little weird because we were actually thinking about also moving all of our other accounts over to them to finally consolidate everything (we never did that when we got married, so we both have separate checking accounts still), but just one thing after another kept piling up against them…

• Misleading Promotional Efforts – the ARM 5/5 was pitched as their new flagship program that would be “perfect” for new home-buyers like us, but only those with impeccable credit and a considerable down payment will ever actually qualify
• Empty Incentives – they showed us an offer where we’d get $250 off closing costs if we moved a bunch of business to them, but were later told that we didn’t qualify because we would’ve had to do it before we even submitted our application for the loan, whereas we wanted to make sure we actually were going to use them before moving the rest of our financial lives to follow suit!
• Availability – pretty simple … they’re open 8am – 6pm Monday – Friday, and we never got a callback Monday morning when we left a message Saturday that we needed help in a hurry; the other guy not only helped us out that same weekend, but he also spent another two hours talking on the phone with me at 10:30pm tonight answering all of my questions and giving his advice
• Call Center Mentality – so the credit union did ok with this at first, but as the process dragged on for days, it started to break up because whenever I’d call in to their 800#, the guy I needed was always on another call … I think I worked with 3 different agents before we finally got the offers that I had mentioned earlier; for Mortgage Broker #2, I’ve got direct e-mail and cell numbers for him specifically and I’ve never had to talk to anyone else
• One More Thing… – and lastly, the credit union has thrown us off course so many other times … who’s to say that they won’t do it again???

I think that last one was icing on the cake just because we do have a couple of blemishes on our collective credit history that we’re trying to overcome and in the end, other guy ended up being a lot more reassuring that he’d work with us to make sure we got approved, whereas we’ve been getting a lot of “the underwriter still has to approve…” and “I’m not sure why the computer won’t approve…”-type comments from the credit union … we’re turning our summer upside-down to try and make this happen, and we just need as many good people in our corner as we can possibly find! And I do appreciate that our guy has taken so much of his time to explain the subtle nuances of the mortgage system with us, even earlier during a time when he was pretty sure that the loan was going to end up with the credit union instead.

I suppose that ended up being a pretty good gamble on his part after all – be as honest and helpful as you can, and then reap the benefits when the bigger guy can’t follow through on what his team promised … it’s a business strategy that I can respect, and it really makes me feel better about paying a little bit more each month to instead work with somebody who I can honestly feel like he’s actually looking out for us when we’re getting ready to make the biggest purchase in our lives (so far)…