Bank Banter

The house had been vacant for between 2 and 3 years. The former owners dropped the house (foreclosure or short sale), so it was bank owned. Kevin has a friend who is a real estate investor, and helped us secure a cash loan. Final offer: $160k, with $60k renovation loan. The offer was accepted and we dove into the purchase process.

Now we hoped that the cash loan would simplify the loan process (rather than going FHA, Fannie Mae, VA, Conventional, or any other)... But in the long run it was still a mess.

It simply ended up that there were too many hands in the pot... Besides us, our realtor, and the investor/broker, there was also another loan guy and his secretary and all kinds of people... So obviously there came a lot of mixed messages. Nearly the whole time, they'd told us that there would be no down needed, and that the closing costs would be rolled into the loan... Then out of the blue, they tell us we have to come up with 20%!! Oh, no, we'll see what we can do... We can roll 10% into the loan, so you only have to round up 10% then we're golden.

Right... So easy to round up a whopping $16,000. Long story short, it took us about a week, a lot of scrimping and phone calls and we had our down done and wired in.

We sat and waited for the phone call or email to let us know we were all set... Then the following week we get an email "now here is how much you owe for closing costs." Uhh... Say what??? A flurry of phone calls later, and quite a few apologies from parties involved, and "well, we tried, but we just can't roll them into this loan." So now we get to dig up another $8,000. Ouch. Ok, I've bought a house before, and I'll tell you, it was NOT this bad!!! Given, it was what... Nearly 10 years ago, so things have changed... But ouch.

I'll be honest, I was so frustrated, I was ready to back out at several points in this process (and this is the readers digest version of events) but anything worth doing is a challenge. Kevin never lost hope. Ultimately, we had one last miracle worker who stepped in and helped us with the closing costs (cause I'd sunk all I had left in the down payment).

Three days later, we got the final email. We'd closed. We had officially won the battle and we were now home owners.




If I can give anyone any advice for buying a home... Don't trust anyone when they say they can "roll stuff into the loan." Just plan on paying a minimum of 10% down and 5% closing. In the end, if they actually succeed in rolling that in, kudos for you. But there's nothing like that sinking feeling that you now have only 3 days to do the impossible (or sell an organ) or game over.

P.S. All "loaning" parties were paid back within 2 weeks after closing.