PAPER, PAPER, AND MORE PAPER

If someone would have told me what all it takes to buy a house these days, I may have paused before jumping into the whole process.  So let's reflect on the CRAZY that we had to go through just to get the house.

Once the offer was accepted, we had to get the mortgage approved.  The closing date was set for July 27th.  This turned out to be more impossible than it was to build our house in Wichita.  Since Jake's dad was moving in with us, he wanted to gift us some money for the downpayment.  Unfortunately, the bank wanted verification that we had income sufficient to cover the monthly payments and told us that he could only contribute 15% downpayment.  We would have to come up with the remaining 5%, plus have 12 months of mortgage payments in liquid assets.  Jake's 401K would allow us to take a loan out from it to cover the 5%, but this would have several people involved making several hiccups along the way.  First we had our broker in Wichita that would set apart the funds to be liquidated into the loan amount.  Then the 401K company had to receive these orders to make the loan and repayment plan.  I'd like to add that we got this plan about 2 weeks before they sent us the actual money.  We soon discovered that this company was actually a middle man for another company that was handling this loan and that we couldn't directly communicate with their reps.  We would utilize Jake's office clerk, Abbi almost 2 weekly for updates on this loan.

This loan was just one aspect of the crazy.  The mortgage people would be contacting me almost daily via email or phone call about some papers they would need.  I had to send them copies of the canceled checks from the last 2 years to show we paid our taxes.  They needed an offer letter from Jake's future job to show verification of employment.  This alone was a task, since the new group didn't actually send him a letter.  A huge hiccup with all of this paperwork was the process of sending it to them.  Since I was out of state, they requested I send them this information via email.  Well, we don't own a scanner, so I resorted to taking pics with my phone and sending them.  On several occasions my photos didn't work.  So eventually I was visiting Jake's office and asking Abbi to scan papers and send them for me via pdf.  (FYI-there is an amazing app that I didn't get until the last 2 weeks of this process that will take pics with my phone and convert to a pdf.)

This was all to get the mortgage for this new house.  I wish I could say this was the most stressful part.  But tomorrow I will share the peak of the stress.