After almost 4 months, we finally closed on 8/15/12. We have been though MANY bumps in the road. If we did it, any of you can.
Our journey started in 2009. We had a sucky realtor & were trying to find a house before I gave birth. My husband was in school & the bank would not count his income b/c he was considered part time at work even though he worked 50hrs a week. We made an offer on a house (being sold by our realtors co-worker), got a super bad counter offer & we walked away. Then I gave birth & couldn't qualify until I went back to work.
We postponed the search for a year. At this point my husband started a new job where he worked a mandatory 90 hours a week & was making about 3x as much as I was. I immediately resigned from my job & we started house house hunting again. The bank then told us in order to count his overtime he'd have to be there for 2 years. We stopped searching for another year until somebody told us to try another lender.
We searched lender after lender & nobody could comprehend his work schedule. They wouldn't even listen to us explain it. Very frustrating but helped us weed out the incompetent loan officers.
We finally found wells fargo. Our LO was inexperienced & over worked. She was horrible about responding to us, but she gave us a shot & wanted to help us & that's what mattered.
By this time business was booming in our small town so housing prices were sky rocketing & the houses were flying off the market the same day they were listed. You had no time to think about anything.
We found a little fixer upper (we didn't want to push our luck b/c she was unsure of how the underwriter would view our income) & entered into contract. The deal fell through b/c the sellers wouldn't help with any repairs or even have the furnace serviced at least for us. We walked, but in reality I think the realtors messed the deal up for us as we had met the sellers & they seemed like great people.
After that we found a for sale by owner, made a verbal offer, went back & forth with this guy while he jerked us around for a while & nothing ended up coming of it.
Finally my husband reached the two year mark at his employer & wells fargo gave us our pre-approval (more like a pre-qual) for almost $100k more than what we had been approved for. It was time to start shopping! Then we found out my husband was going to be laid off!!
He immediately found another job, same field better pay but our pre-approval obviously plummeted. And then what do you know I found a house, THE house, the day after he started his job.
With the market being like it is here, I had to jump on it. I got him to agree to it via text message pics, made my (his) offer & we were under contract on 4/30/12 with technically no pre-approval since he started a new job.
We had to then wait for 2 pay stubs to come in. Which took about 4 weeks. So we pushed back closing to the end of june. Finally went to underwriting & within 10 days we had our approval. Easy right? Not so fast. My husband then got notified that the new job was laying him off. Since we had to wait for the pay checks, the title company took their good old time getting our documents ready, by the time we were ready for the employment verification, he was laid off, so the loan was dead in the water.
At the same time my husband's previous employer offered him his old position back which he took but it wasn't starting for a few weeks. We had to talk the sellers into extending the contract, which we did, until 8/15. Then we had to again wait for 2 paychecks (stupid).
My husband then went back to work but on a shortened work week schedule for 2 weeks!!! (we needed FULL paychecks)
Our rate lock was set to expire on 7/31, we had to pay a $1300 return to float fee but then wells fargo did a free 10 day extension. Our loan officer didn't cash the check & submitted our file to underwriting to at least get it started.
A few days later, 2 days after our rate lock expired, we got the clear to close. The underwriter approved us with only 1 paycheck that wasn't even the full amount. & to top it off our LO paid a fee to extend our rate & we got the check back.
So sorry for the long, long story (try living it!), but like I said, if we can do it, so can you & it will all work out in the end!!
Starting Score: EQ 613
