It's almost over (yay!)

Thanks for the prayers today. Please keep praying. Here's the skinny (aka - boring house hunting details follow...)

So the land bank has had our application for a week now. We were to have an answer, one way or the other, by Thursday. Last Thursday. No word. Nothing Friday, either. We called the realtor and left messages. No word back. Not Friday. Not Saturday. Not Sunday.

In the meantime, we were told that the interest rate for a land loan is about two WHOLE points higher than on a conventional loan, and even one point higher even than we'd been told before. That was information we didn't have before. Ouch.

Our lease expired the end of July and our rent went up another hundred and fifty dollars. OK... This isn't getting any better.

SO, we decided over the weekend that if there were any more hurdles to this loan, it was time to pull the plug. It's grown too big. It's taking too long, and it is not going to be feasible. It's a real mess. But, we wanted to touch base today, hoping we'd have a final answer, one way or the other.

When I called this morning, we got our answer. They hadn't received a signed contract from the realtor last week. They still did not have the letter from the appraiser (another part the realtor was to have taken to them). The bank had not done their new appraisal. They had not even pulled Zorak's credit yet. Nothing. They had not done one single thing last week. At all. And the interest rate went up again.

Well, those are hurdles. At this point, we'd have to wait another two weeks to hear back as to whether or not they are even willing to do the loan with no money down. That puts us an extra two months here in the apartment, IF the loan can be done, trying to swing both an increased rental payment and a much higher mortgage payment than anticipated. And that pretty much takes out any leeway we had. Timer dings. Time's up.

We called the realtor back to withdraw the offer. Suddenly, she's available. And now, she's gung-ho on keeping this deal alive. Which, yes, I can appreciate her perspective. But when she calls us now and says she is meeting with the president of the bank to get this deal pushed through... we can't help but wonder where she was a month ago when we were trying to get the ball rolling? She knew this was a matter of getting things done and closing by the end of the month. We've been very upfront about the situation. But the bare facts are that we cannot get the financing we need, and we can't seem to be able to get anything pushed through in a timely manner and the eleventh hour is not the time to bring out your connections and "make it happen". The window has closed.

It was a difficult decision to make, and although we're not happy to have had to make it, we know it was right. If we kept pushing and pulling, we'd have ended up with no capital to make repairs and payments far above what we could budget. That's the best case scenario. The most likely result is that we'd have stayed in limbo another two weeks, only to get the final "no" and then be left to start again from square one.

So. There we are. And it's actually good. Not spectacular, but definitely the right decision. For a number of reasons.

Part two tomorrow...

Kiss those babies!
~Dy