I've been reading and reviewing this website for about a year now and I finally decided to create an account and make my first post. This first post is mostly going to be me venting about the drawn out nightmare that me an my wife are currently facing trying to buy our first home. Please forgive my long windedness and the bouncing around but I felt I should share my story for anybody that might encounter the same nightmare.
To give a little bit of background me and my wife are in our mid 30's and have not always made the right choices regarding money and paying bills. My wife is a little further in the game and her credit has recovered to the low 700s but as many of you may know when running credit for a mortgage lenders want to use the lower mid score. At the time of the credit pull my mid score was 620 and our lender wanted a minimum of 640. At this point me and my wife are disappointed and decided that we should get our acts together and start repairing our credit. Admittedly we were naive about the process of buying a home and thought that we could magically find money for inspections, down payments, closing costs, and whatever else was needed.
Fast forward about 6 months or so, I was able to get a tax refund that helped to pay some bills off (snow ball effect) as well as get a new job that gave me a substantial increase in pay. My wife also was able to pay a couple of bills down and we were able to put a couple of dollars aside for inspections, down payments, and closing cost. We contact our lender again and she gives us great news "Congrats, you are pre-approved". At this point we encountered our first bump in the road, where do we look for an affordable house in a decent neighborhood that isn't 100 miles from our jobs that also had decent schools. Well we started looking and lets just say the first couple of houses looked like they were movie sets from horror movies. The next set of houses were either foreclosures that needed a lot of work or were just 203k only houses and we didn't want to deal with something like that for our first home. I searched high and low and had many sleepless nights (just on the house hunt might I add) and one day we finally found a house. This particular house was slightly out of our budget before but had recently dropped in price and we just had to see what the inside of this house looked like.
On the day we went to look at this house we did some research and found out that this house had been on the market for about 8 or 9 months with little to no intrest from most. When our realtor gets there he informs us that this house is part of an estate sale. We knew what an estate sale was but didn't know how estate sale property is sold. But the house was in great condition and had several new upgrades (kitchen, bathrooms, and HVAC system) so we decided to take the plung and put a contract on the house. Oh I forgot to mention me and my wife decided to try USDA Guaranteed loan. So you lenders and real estate agents can probably see where this story is going.
Get the contract and now the family representative for the estate only has a minor counter and we decided we could handle it. It took us about a month to get a ratified contract due to the family rep living out of the state, which was kind of nerve racking but we figured this was all apart of buying a house. As the family rep gradually sends back the signed contract we approach our next surprise/bump in the road. The previous owner took out a second mortgage on the home (which probably explains the upgrades I mentioned before). So if you are keeping count we are dealing with an Estate Sale, USDA Guarenteed loan, a family rep who is in no rush to do anything with the property, and two banks. Also of those two banks the first bank has grown tired of waiting and has decided they now want to foreclose. A bit of silver lining is we get the appraisal done and guess who has equity!!! But the appraiser went to the house and the electric wasn't on so this posed a problem, for us. The appraiser had to come back with the power on which of course is an additional charge.
Two months go by and there are several meetings with the lender and the real estate agent trying to keep us grounded and walking us through the process. The real estate agent then informs us that the first bank is willing to hold off on the foreclosure since we have the contract but the second bank isn't budging on the price so we are told. 3 weeks or so go by and my wife is really getting anxious so she starts digging around on the internet. Can you believe that my wife went to the state Estate website and found that the second mortgage had been paid in Janurary (we are in mid July at this point). She calls to ask our RE agent to look into this and he calls back apologizing and saying the lawyer for the estate was trying to call the bank but could never get anyone and had basically been playing phone tag for 2 months.
So it's the end of July and of course we are set to close in early August but we were never given a CTC or an expecting closing date. I then started reading other peoples stories and came across this thing called a Rate Lock and how it expires. Well, guess what our Rate Lock expires on 13 August and now me and my wife are in full panic mode. We knew the appraiser had to come back out with the electricity on and we knew (through the general inspector) that the light post in the front yard was tripping the circuit breaker which caused lights and outlets inside the house not to work. Fearful of the upcoming Rate Lock expiration we figured we would ask our realtor for access to the house to correct the electrical issues. He quickly said no and we would just have to hope the appraisers second visit would not notice (which luckily he did).
Now we sit waiting on USDA to review our paperwork. We feverishly hit refresh on the USDA website waiting on the date to show 3August which was the date our docs were finally submitted. Over the long weekend we noticed that the date hadn't changed from earlier in the week so my wife decides to call the local office. Apparently this is the week that all USDA reviewers were in a state wide mandated training for the whole week. Big let down, we were totally discouraged and emotionally drained. So Wednesday 8/12 I decide I'm not checking USDA, we're not calling the realtor or the lender we are just going to let fate take care of this. I'm sitting at my desk and I get an email from my lender that says basically "USDA is clear and we are waiting on the final appraisal". My mouth drops I almost fall out my chair and I call my wife. As we are happy and celebrating I get another email that basically says "the final appraisal is clear and we are all set to close". OMG!!! Where did all of this come from!!!!
But like you would imagine more bad news. The lender basically says the title company might not have enough appointments for a Friday afternoon closing and we might have to push it to Monday 8/17 
Later on that same day we get an email from the realtor again who basically says the first bank is having problems calculating the payoff amount for the loan and it will take 5-7 days to get this taken care of.... AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!
So hopefully sometime next week me and my wife will be first time homeowners, hopefully.
Dear 800 and wife, welcome to this wonderful forum. What a rough time you both have had, but it is nearly over! Congratulations and hang in there. Don't you want to dance a jig!!!
I'm so sorry that you have endured all of the issues. This makes me extremely nervous to get the ball rolling on my first home purchase. Keeping fingers crossed that everything will work out in the end.
Starting scores TU: 537 EQ: 571 Current Scores 8/2015 TU:641 EQ: 641EX: 643
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