You have finally arrived at adulthood. Here you are ready to go to the bank, sign some papers and buy your first home. Sounds easy right? My first experience definitely wasn't!
My husband and I found an ad for a house that had just gone up on the market and were delighted with it! I called the real estate listing agent and was told that we would need a preapproval letter from the bank in order to make an appointment. Not knowing any better I readily agreed I would give them a call.
While listening to the radio on my way to work I heard an ad for a really nice sounding mortgage broker who said that she had access to all kinds of loans and could find the one for me. I was super excited and gave her a call immediately! She collected our information and we began the preapproval process. We discovered through this process that according to lending companies you are not a good candidate for a home loan if you have been responsible and not charged up a bunch of money on credit cards. My husband didn't qualify.
So I decided that was fine and I could just buy the house myself. By the time we had worked out the preapproval process, the house was gone. Disappointed, but not discouraged I asked out mortgage broker for a real estate agent suggestion.
We scheduled an appointment to meet with her and she explained how real estate agents worked and that we would need to sign a contract with her in order for her to represent us and show us any houses. We told her we would think about it and went home to discuss with family members that had experience purchasing houses. Everyone that we talked to said definitely don't sign a contract. So we began to look for another real estate agent. We found one through my son's school. Thinking it would be great that I had found a real estate agent that had a child my son's age would be great and maybe I would make a great friend!
We met with her and began to see houses. We looked at three or four and found a perfect house and made a bid. Well as it turns out someone else felt it was the perfect house also and out bid us on it. So we began looking some more. We finally found another house we felt might fit our needs ok and made a bid about 5k under asking. They immediately came back at full price and wouldn't budge. Our agent said we shouldn't negotiate any more on the price and didn't think they would take any lower on it. My husband and I had a bad feeling about this, but we're so excited to get a house we pushed the feeling aside and decided to proceed anyways.
We started the inspection process and found several things wrong with the property. Broken windows, broken back door, the garage door was so rusted at the bottom it wouldn't open, electrical outlets that were uncovered, and they had pulled the gutter downspouts off the house and had water running onto the foundation, among other things. We took the list of repairs and requested that the most important things be fixed. We didn't ask for cosmetic damages or frivolous things, just basic functions we needed to make the house liveable. They didn't want to fix anything except an outlet cover and repair the glass in the Windows, but not replace them even though the latches were all broken and the windows were at least 40 years old.
And to top it all off, our loan officer couldn't keep anything straight. She didn't inform us about specific changes to the FHA loans that would never allow us the relief from pmi payments! We talked to our real estate agent about this and explained that she didn't have our best interests in mind and we wanted to change loan companies and use our bank. She told us that we couldn't do that and we needed to stick with what we had.
We were pretty upset. They wouldn't negotiate on price, they wouldn't negotiate on repairs, and we felt like we were being taken advantage of on our loan. Wasn't home buying supposed to be fun? Wasn't this supposed to be a fantastic life event? It was HELL! When we countered on repairs against our real estate agents advice, they made an error saying that they would replace the Windows. I called our real estate agent asking if that was indeed what they meant. She called me back and left a voice mail explaining if we tried to hold them to the replacing of Windows they would sue us and all kinds of things. Being threatened definitely wasn't in any of the literature I had read on home buying.
My husband and I took a minute of silence and really looked at each other. His face was full of anger and frustration and mine looked like someone had just kicked me. We both knew that we couldn't follow through on this contract. It just wasn't worth it.
We ended up voiding our contact and losing some money. I say some money because it was far, far less then the 100k+ we felt we would have lost on the house. We were disappointed, but we almost felt a sense of relief. It was finally over. I told my husband I never wanted to buy a house again. It was such a horrific experience for us.
We waited about 6-7 months. My husband paid down his school loans, he got an Amazon credit card to make payments on and slowly began to build some credit. I dealt with a lot of depression and frustration at the time and effort I had tried to put into buying a house by myself and just general self-pity.
My husband sat me down one day and told me to really look at the changes that had come about since we lost the house. We were more unified, we didn't fight as much, and we have a common goal. This was no longer just my fight. This was OURS. We would start over and build this memory together. Both signatures on every document. I began to see how very wrong I had always been in my approach to buying a house. I was truly seeing it as a place to live; desperation at not having a roof over my head. I wasn't envisioning the life that would accompany this huge decision.
We started completely over. New bank, new real estate agent, and a knowledge of the way things are not supposed to go. Equipped with our tools we have started the process of finding our dream home together - like it was always meant to be.
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