Let me just kick the dust bunnies and cobwebs out of the way, and apologize for my hiatus. Things here have been…stressful…of late.
It seems this year that for every piece of good news we get, we also get a complimentary kick in the teeth. Latest example? Well, the Gestating Girl is apparently gestating along just fine. She’s already upside down and in the lotus position, practicing her swallowing and gaining weight in preparation for her October debut. We’re at 3 lbs, 10 oz. right now, which is awesome. I tend to have nice, petite babies, which makes me happy. So things are doing just fine on that front right now.
Which means that of course SOMETHING needs to go horribly awry with the house moving. Apparently a local builder–who had several homes he couldn’t sell and a debt load he couldn’t therefore sustain–undersold all the homes on the market in the neighborhood where we’re buying just in time to completely screw up the appraisals process. So, even though the home we’re purchasing appraises well above what we’re paying for it, the aforesaid builder skewed everything downward far enough that the mortgage insurance company my loan agent is using won’t cover the mortgage, hyper-excellent credit rating, sizeable down-payment and fabulous debt-to-income ratio be damned. Commence mad scrambling from my loan agent, realtor, etc., to find someone else to cover it or figure out a way to make this work. We’re two weeks from closing, by the way.
So. I am shortly to be 8 months pregnant and homeless. You do NOT want to be around me when this happens, and I calmly informed my loan agent and realtor that perhaps they should pass this data along to the mortgage insurance people as well, so that they won’t be alarmed when a large, enraged pregnant woman shows up at their office and commences to give birth on their doorstep.
At least when my newborn daughter shakes her tiny, angry fist at them, I will feel somewhat better. Maybe if I’m really lucky, she’ll poop on them as well.
August 14, 2009 at 7:07 pm
That last line just slayed me!
August 15, 2009 at 3:13 am
Oh god, we bought a house this past fall and the financing was a nightmare. While we were house hunting, interest rates fluctuated so wildly that every day we had a different price range. Then the mortgage insurance companies were scrambling to keep up with the insanity and so changed their policies every week. One week we needed PMI, the next we didn’t. One week we needed 3% down, the next we needed 20%, and then 10%, and then, well maybe we couldn’t get a loan at all. It was torture. Our mortgage broker couldn’t keep up with the changes and our financing fell through with 2 weeks to go, just like you. We were lucky and found a good loan that didn’t cost us any more than the one we had planned. I wish you good luck.
August 17, 2009 at 3:40 pm
At least NCSU is a nice safe stable refuge where you can unwind from the travails of home life.
After a nearly ten year absence, I agreed to teach a course this fall as an adjunct. The paperwork may not be ready in time, however, as the background check needs to be completed. Despite the fact that I taught there for 14 years, I guess they need to make sure that this 52 year old married father of two is not a sex criminal or a gun nut.
August 18, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I thought I had heard of everything, but an appraisal not good enough for the insurance company – that’s crazy. Don’t get too worried, they will figure out something, but uggh.
August 18, 2009 at 7:22 pm
LB –
Well, you know what they say…it’s always the quiet ones. Classes start tomorrow–will you be instructing the unwashed?
Cynedra –
Our loan agent is similarly puzzled. Me, I’m moving beyond puzzled into freaked out and excessively pissed off. Apparently, appraisals are meaningless–your house will be worth whatever some random paper pusher decides it’s worth, and interestingly enough, that value will tend to work in favor of saving said paper-pusher’s ass, not in favor of getting you a place to live (that you’ve already proven you can definitely afford).
Someone explain to me again the point of mortgage insurance?
August 19, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Since it’s a graduate engineering course, it’s likely to be Chinese and Indians (the Asian kind). I am unsure of their hygienic habits, but they couldn’t be any worse than the born-and-bred NC undergraduate who sat in the front row, chewed tobacco, and spat into a cup he put on the front of his desk which was right under my nose. I finally had to make him stop.
It’s a TuTh class and no paperwork yet so officialdom has 24 hours to get things going. I am reminded of why I left in the first place.
———
The first house I ever bought I paid $80k in 1985 and bought it FSBO. It was a good house but suffered from bad interior decorating. It was in the white-collar part of a blue-collar town and was in the “good schools” part of town. Funny thing. Illinois hadn’t been forced to bus for “diversity” even though the town was mostly segregated. So there was a lot of competition to get into this part of town.
So I got it fixed up and when I left that job about 2 years later, I put it on the market FSBO at $89k. I had an open house on Sunday and on Monday I had an offer for $89k. But that buyer backed out when the bank/appraisal people told him it was only worth what I paid for it – $80k. In fact, the appraiser came by the house, realized that she had done the appraisal for it when I bought it and just wrote down the same $80k.
So I had another open house and got TWO more offers of $86k and $89k. Nope says the bank/appraiser, it’s only worth $80k. So I had to sell it for $80k.
“Fair market value (FMV) is an estimate of the market value of a property, based on what a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured buyer would probably pay to a knowledgeable, willing, and unpressured seller in the real estate market.”.
Apparently the lazy appraiser’s word counted more than three offers near the asking price. What a racket and it’s always been that way.
August 19, 2009 at 3:42 pm
LB –
Yeah, I’m thinking of starting a one-woman campaign against mortgage insurance companies. It’ll give me something to do to pass the time while I’m living in my CAR!
Urg.
And also, Eww on the tobacco-chewing in class. I always taught 8:05 sections, and would encourage students to bring in caffeine so that we weren’t all just sitting there staring at each other in a stupor–but I think I would have drawn the line at chewable nicotine as well.