The Whole Story

Yesterday morning, we woke up excited. Only 8 hours until closing! Eight hours! Then six hours! No word from our realtor, things were still going! Yay! Four hours! Three hours! We're all good! Two hours, things are great! One hour 45 minutes. The realtor calls. We need to bring $500 more than expected to closing. Now, normally this wouldn't be a huge problem. We have a decent savings account. Enough to pay expenses if, say, Doug were suddenly fired from the Army. Yeah, right. But, because we would own 2 houses and have to make mortgage payments on these 2 houses until one of them sells or rents, we have our budget down to the dime for the next few months. Rental truck, mortgage, electricity on one house, and on the other, several weddings to attend. It's all going somewhere, and not into savings.

So, Doug said to the realtor, "We can't do it." She suggested many things, including taking out a credit line on our credit cards. Doug and I don't use credit cards. At all. We are a cash/debit card only family, and that just didn't work for us. So, after telling them that we thought it was really stinky that they only gave us 1 hour and 45 minutes to come up with $500 more than the 5% downpayment we had already needed, we headed off for the realtor to get the exact number and contemplate if it was even possible.

When we saw Angie, she said, "I'll pay for your moving truck if you can come up with the money for the downpayment." So, we headed to the Fort to dip into our savings account. After passing through the checkpoints we went to the bank to get the precise amount on the cashier's check. We did this, left the Fort and went back to the realtor. She said, "I tried to reach you but I couldn't. The amount you have to come up with is only $220!" Yay! But we still had the wrong amount on the cashier's check. After making a quick call, she found out that the title company would just cut us a check back.

Minutes later, we're at the title company, sitting at the closing table, and we look at the interest rate on our loan. It was 1/4% higher than it was supposed to be, because we had locked the loan more than 5 days previously. After calling our mortgage officer and her reading the fine print, it turns out that the day of locking and the day of closing don't count. Grrr....

We sign papers. More papers. Still more papers. We sign our lives away.

Congratulations, we officially own a(nother) house! Give them the checks and RUN before anyone changes their minds! Oh, what? The checks are made out to Doug when they were supposed to made out to the title company? We have go to BACK to the Fort and change them? Grrrr....

Back we go, through checkpoints and inspections and get to the bank, where it takes an act of Congress to cash almost $6000 in cashier's checks. These bankers were starting to wonder who the lady in the wheelchair was and why she had been in 4 times in the last 2 days. Getting a cashier's check every time.

Finally we were done. We do own another house and we're moving on Saturday to what my mom called "the most peaceful retreat on earth".