Home-less or Home-ful?

My sweetie and I are currently going through a rite of passage called "Buying Our First Home."

Actually, it feels like some kind of hazing ritual with everything we've gone through in the last few months. When we first started this process, the realtor made it sound so easy. Well, kind of. We learned very quickly that if we were interested in a house, we had to put a bid in quickly--like within hours of seeing it. At one point, we were putting bids in on houses without physically seeing them first. In fact, that's exactly what happened with the house we are buying. Just in the month or so that we were looking, we definitely had the sense that the market was getting more and more aggressive.

Of course, after our we had a bid finally accepted and we started working with the mortgage broker, things became a little more complicated as we had to supply every important document imaginable. Understandable, though.

Once we sent our massive package of papers to the underwriters, we thought it was going to be easy-breezy. Oh no! The underwriters kept questioning this and that, requiring more and more documentation. Once we would produce the documentation they required, that would just open up another can of worms. Or five cans.

It's been an emotional roller coaster. We think things are going smoothly, and then there's just one more thing we have to produce. And about every other time, it has required money to fix it up.

Just a week ago, I was in tears. We'd already told that our paperwork made it through the underwriters with stipulations, which we thought we can cleared up. We had already put in our notice to the property manager that we were moving by the end of the month.

And then...the documents we provided were not good enough, and there were no such documents that they were demanding. Nope, did not exist!

It was an insane bit, too. The underwriters wanted documentations stating that my sweetie does not pay child support. Pay child support to whom? He has had full physical and legal custody of his children for three years. Their mother has no rights whatsoever. He had two documents stating so, and he also had a statement showing the last time he did pay child support, the balance due and the amount paid. (He overpaid and did not get a refund.) Not good enough. So, he had the California family services fax a document stating that his account was paid and closed. Not good enough.

And this is what I was in tears over. We'd paid a lot of money, and put in a lot of time to get some of our hurdles cleared, and now we were at a stand-off that made no sense.

We found out that it was Veteran's Administrator underwriter who was hassling us so much, so my sweetie started making phone calls. He reached a supervisor who understood how California courts worked and agreed that we had provided more than enough documentation. Furthermore, he was willing to review our files and talk to the other underwriters, too. Phew! Wonderful.

But while on the phone with the nice supervisor, a new question, "Did you have a termite inspection?"

What? Nobody has ever said anything about that! Much like the insurance hassle, where, two days after paper work was submitted to my insurance agent, the underwriters decided we needed flood insurance, too. I could have told them we were in a flood zone since the back of the house neighbors a wash. Yea, we don't get a lot of rain, but we do have have monsoon season for real some years.

And two days after I went to the insurance agent to sign the paperwork, I found out I had to pay for the flood insurance up front for the year. Nobody could have said anything so while I was waiting 45 minutes at my agent's desk while he tried to get the paperwork figured out that perhaps I could go ahead and pay? That would have been considerate of everyone's time, right?

And so it goes...termite inspection. Just another thing.


As far as I know, things are pretty well ready to go, but tomorrow I'm expecting that we'll need to have a seance to check the house for restless spirits. And then perhaps a shaman will need to cleanse our almost-home.

Or perhaps we'll need to pay for UFO insurance, as I'm betting we're in the flight path between Area 51 and Nellis Airforce Base.

So, anyway...

Rite of passage.

I've had a few friends tell me that the struggles and hoops we've gone through are pretty typical. Funny, nobody ever bothered to prepare me for the mental anguish I was about experience when I embarked on this journey.

Thanks a lot.