Novella Warning - it's a long boi
For the Swamperts (Swamp Experts) out there that know me IRL, they know one of my primary goals in life has been to move out of my birth state of California. I hate California, with a burning intensity that could power a developing country. It's become a meme-turned-pseudo-sport for my family to find blame in California for all bad things in life. I am tired of living in one of the most expensive and entitled states in this great Union, and have been counting the days before we are capable of moving away.
So when the house next door to my cousins in Virginia came on the market, I thought I had seen a brilliant beacon of shining opportunity. What I had done is jumped, headfirst, with my wife in tow, in front of an oncoming train that has turned my life into an actual nightmare for the past two months.
Fellow Swamperts (patent pending), I'd like to share with you my first home buying experience - pandemic edition.
When I got the wink-wink nudge-nudge text from my cousins, my first response was the sad smile of knowing the house came on the market two years too early for us. But she was perfect. 3,047 square feet. A beautiful colonial built in 1927 with painted brick facing on a third-acre plot, complete with a finished basement and a hand-built treehouse in the backyard. The more I browsed the page on Zillow, the more I fell in love. What began as fanciful daydreaming turned into a quest to find a way to make the dream a reality.
The stars began to align when I checked the official listing. It was priced to move, in the nicer part of uptown Lynchburg. More than 100 big ones cheaper than what my predicted price range would be. A few speeches to my wife about "romantic, spur of the moment decisions", and within a weekend we were flying across the country to look at the property and meet with our real estate agent. Getting pre-qualified was deceptively easy, so what did we have to lose? Our cousins even put us up for the weekend, so all we were out was the plane tickets if it fell through.
Seeing it first-hand sealed the deal for us. It was a perfect storm. In the two days it was on the market, in a very aggressively marketed neighborhood, it was the only house with lots of foot traffic, but only we were prepared to make an offer. The only fault in the house was that it only has one full bathroom. Not a problem for just me and the missus. Our agent assured us we had all the negotiation power we could need, and pressured us to go big. We were riding the high and within two weeks of the trip, the seller agreed to pay all of our closing costs, the housing inspection came back glowing, and we had conditional approval and a great rate from the bank. Little did we know that was the last good news we'd see on the house.
A week before our closing date, the underwriter sends us a message. My employer hasn't given proof of employment beyond May 17th. In the month and a half we had been working with our loan processor, it had never occurred to me to mention to the bank that I am on furlough due to coronavirus.
Now that your collective facepalms are out of the way, I assure you I had researched this ahead of time. Everything I had read, from sources legal and otherwise, assured me "furlough is still employed", "you can still qualify for a mortgage while on furlough", "Epstein didn't kill himself". It turns out two of those statements are only half-truths. What my bank failed to mention is they need active employment, which specifically excludes furlough. So my income was now a big gooseberry. Luckily, with a small doubling of our down payment, my wife could qualify with her income alone.
The trouble didn't end there. The day before the closing date, the underwriter returns. "Since the wife is the only one with income, she is moving to Virginia, yes?" We hadn't considered that. Our loan processor told us from the get-go that my wife could stay in California until she found a new job. Without my income, however, that assurance was an equally sized gooseberry. Unable to give them the written agreements they asked for, the bank was out.
Day of closing, and we have nothing to show for our seven weeks of escrow. We are now on borrowed time before the seller holds us in default. The thing about a purchase agreement is that the seller can walk away at any time, and the buyer is out scott-free. The buyer, on the other hand, has one or two very specific windows in which they can walk away, and we had long passed them. Should the seller deem us unworthy, we would be on the hook for 7-10% of the value of the home in fines, and would receive a big black mark on our credit for the next two years.
Our real estate agent, looking to pull us out of this nosedive in any way she can, recommends us to a small-town bank there in Lynchburg. We have nowhere else to go, so I decide to call the number she gave me. What she hadn't told me was this small-town bank man was a personal friend of hers, and she had already told him our tale of woe at the hand of "big banking". We were now at the mercy of an in-house loan and the trappings were set.
Our situation being what it was, it should come as no surprise that the loan was a stinker. It was the Megatron of home loans: variable rate, another doubling of our down payment, an extra 3 big ones in closing costs (at our expense, of course), you name it, this loan had it. And the worst part is, we were stuck. If we backed out, we were in default. If we trudged on, we were saddled with Megatron and living paycheck to paycheck till we could refinance.
That was my last week. Staring up at our ceiling fan, too hot and stressed to sleep, listening to cops pull joyriders off the freeway at one in the morning, waking up to a half dozen missed calls from my agents of demise in Virginia. I was at my wit's end. I finally did the one thing I swore I would never do - I broke down and called my parents for help.
And here we are. You are now up to speed on my coronavirus experience. Are we getting the dream house? Hell if I know. I'm jaded to the point that I just want Mr. Bone's Wild Ride to end, one way or the other. My dad is trying to big dick energy through the problem, like he does with all his problems. So far I'm stuck in the limbo of trying to qualify for a loan somewhere on the spectrum between original offer and Megatron, and we have nothing in writing yet.
I needed to share the story - get it off my chest and out into the world. If you made it this far, you should get yourself an extra cookie today. You earned it.
