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Let Me Bend Over Right Now…
During the last week, we’ve been dealing with our mortgage broker over a refinance we’re working on. When you buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area, putting 20% down isn’t exactly that easy. Even if you managed to somehow find a home for $400k, which means you’d be living in the ghetto, 20% would be $80k. Yeah, let me bend over right now so you can jam some hot pokers up my ass, because that’d be less painful. Ugh. $80k would buy a whole house in most areas of the country.
Needless to say, we didn’t have 20% to put down when we bought our house. We only went to talk to the mortgage broker because she was a friend of my real estate agent cousin, who’d been telling me for years to buy some real estate. Most of the time my response was a glazed look that would translate to something like “yeah, I’m not driving around in a Jaguar, so how exactly will we be buying a house”.
Regardless, we spoke to the broker and surprisingly she didn’t laugh us right out of her office when we told her we didn’t have ANYWHERE near the amount of money it would take. In fact, she found a few different ways that we could get into a place. A few months later we were moving into our first home. Crazy.
The program she put us on initially was only meant to get us INTO the house and then after a year or so, we’d refinance. That’s what we were dealing with this week. She got us into a 5-point-something percent rate, so we’re happy.
Obviously, I need a bullet point version of contracts, and it all needs to fit on one piece of paper—a post-it, actually. Jesus. Anyone that has signed real estate contracts will be able to tell you that you have to sign three million sheets of paper. One to show you accept the terms of the contract, even if you have no clue of what those terms are, one that allows them to give you a verbal spanking should you not pay your bills on time, and a multitude of others that gives them various rights such as, being able to tell you that you suck for no reason at all. You know the typical house contracts. All I really needed to know was how much I’d have to pay per month. Just bottom line it for me.
We did however have a few tense moments during the last couple of days. It started out that we were getting back about $700. Then it turned into costing us $900. Then about $1300. Then we got our final estimate Tuesday evening and it showed nearly $4000. Erm. I was starting to have flashbacks of those hot pokers again. In the end, we won’t have mortgage payments for two months, which would cover that amount, so it all worked out.
The good part is that we won’t have to go through this again for awhile. At least until we decide to move someday.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 11:04 am and is filed under A Day in the Life, Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.