Posted by Leigh on September 8, 2008
Everyday lately seems like it lasts forever… I spend most of mine sitting by the phone, hoping it’ll ring with good news.
Unfortunately the only good news I’ve gotten lately is when I stepped on the scale. This whole mess just makes me sick. Unlike most women who fight for years to get back to their high school weight, this mess has actually made me succeed. I now weigh five pounds less than I did when I graduated!
My parents and I met with the local bank loan officer this morning and things looked good…. Until he realized I filed bankruptcy in 2005. So now he’s reprocessing our application with my parents as co-signers, I guess we’ll have the results of that tomorrow. This time he’s running it as a home equity line of credit, which will actually reduce the closing costs by about thirteen thousand, and reduce the loan time from thirty years to twenty years, without changing the monthly payment much. I sure hope he calls with some good news tomorrow.
I couldn’t even get excited when the inspector came out to the new house today and gave us the final approval. Our occupancy permit should be in the mail tomorrow, and we have a temporary one for now. Not that that means much to us at this point.
I thought I had done all the research before we started the process with our mortgage broker, but now things are starting to look a little shady. If I hadn’t been so excited at the construction closing I would have asked more questions about what we were signing, but lo and behold I didn’t. I was just glad that we were ready to begin. Unfortunately, we signed a form stating that we wouldn’t live on the property until the final mortgage has closed.
Convenient how just hours after I let my mortgage broker know that the house was finished, that I got a call stating the bank had gone under. Now I have to wonder why, if such a large bank is going out of business that I can’t find any information on it on the internet? Wouldn’t that have made the news somewhere?
It’s looking more and more like the company we’re dealing with is trying to scam us a bit, if not a lot. They had us sign all sorts of forms that no other bank has even seen, these forms have even dumbfounded our attorney. They seem to break all banking laws, but because we’ve already signed them, are legally binding. Which means that until they or we secure a loan - we can’t move in.
They’ve also done everything they can to get us to pay all kinds of ridiculous fees, and default on our payments. We’ve never even received a statement from them, yet we’ve made monthly payments since construction began. She always tells me that the statements must have gotten lost in the mail… But three statements three months in a row getting lost? Come on now. If I hadn’t put the payments in my PDA we probably would have missed them, giving them the power to foreclose on our property.
Guess it’s a good thing that I’m at least organized. Or at least I used to be when I actually had a desk… Now I have mountains of papers stacked on mountains of clothes and it takes hours to find anything.
Then there’s the appraiser. We paid for the first appraisal upfront at the dealership. When the appraiser made the appointment with me, I informed her of this. The mortgage broker then told her that it was wrong and I was supposed to pay her when she came out. I called the dealership and had their wonderful (not being sarcastic) secretary sort the whole mess out. The secretary called me and assured me that the appraiser had been paid in advance and not to give her a check when she came out. So the appraiser showed up two days before her appointment, looked at the property for less than five minutes and asked me for a check. I refused, because I knew she had already been paid.
Now that the house is finished, they want another appraisal. But suddenly the appraisal fee has jumped by $150. What a crock! The lady jumped her prices that much in three months? I think not, so I called her. Not claiming to be myself I asked her about her appraisal fees, they were the same as before, so apparently our horrible mortgage brokers want the extra money for themselves. Ridiculous! They’re already figuring almost thirteen thousand in closing costs for themselves. Greedy, greedy people.
Then the mortgage brokers sent us another “loan application” to fill out. It’s actually an application for another mortgage broker. Why can’t they do it themselves? Why have they suddenly decided to hand us off to a competing company? And why does the new mortgage broker ask for all of our credit card numbers and want us to sign a release stating that they can charge them at any time for any fees they feel necessary?
I just flat out refuse to sign any papers for this new mortgage broker, and I’ve ordered copies of our credit reports. As i have not authorized them to check our credit, there had better not be any inquiries that originated from them, or they will hear from our attorney.
It’s just one big mess after another, and I’m left feeling foolish. I trusted the home dealership to put us in touch with a respectable mortgage broker company, but apparently they didn’t. Our lawyer thinks we might have a case there, against both the dealership and the mortgage brokers! I could care less, right now about suing anyone. I just want to be able to move into my house. But is it ever going to happen?
Why oh why didn’t we just go to the local bank in the first place? Oh wait, because they only like to deal with people with perfect credit. They wouldn’t even give my younger sister and her husband a loan for a twenty-five thousand dollar house without a cosigner, even though they make over seventy-five thousand a year between the two of them! And the home dealership assured us that a mortgage broker would get us a better rate… Yeah, a better rate for the mortgage brokers I guess!
I guess tomorrow will be another long day of sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring…. But I guess I don’t have anything better to do anyway, I can’t concentrate on anything lately.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted by Leigh on September 7, 2008
Home building is tiresome, trying and hardwork, and just as we thought we we’re about to move in….
We run into yet another glitch…
Our final inspection is schedule for tomorrow, I was so excited on Friday when they came and hooked up the electric just hours after I had called about it. Then at four o’clock on Friday, as I was getting my daughter off the bus, I got a call from our mortgage broker.
I always hate it when the first words out of someone’s mouth are “Now don’t panic yet…” But that’s what I heard from her. Through no fault of our own, the bank that had given us a loan commitment, upon the completion of our house can no longer fulfill that commitment. They’ve gone under, their investors will not give them another cent, and the owner was taken to the hospital with chest pains.
Isn’t that just our luck. Just three days before we should have gotten the OK to move in, things go bad. I have to admit, I cried. We’re living in my parents basement, all in one room. And now we’ll be here for who knows how long, until we secure another loan.
Anyone want to lend us about a hundred thousand? 
So now we pretty much have to start over. The mortgage broker send us an application by email, from a lender that has pre-approved us, but it looks questionable to me, so…. I also have an appointment at a local bank tomorrow morning with my parents to see what they can do to help, my dad has even offered to put his house up as collateral if needed (but we sure hope it doesn’t come to that.) So I guess we’ll see what comes up there. We’ve also spoken to our attorney about it and he’s assured us that because we’ve stuck to the terms of our contract, that they have to find us a lender because they can’t touch the property.
Either way, they don’t want us living there until we have secured a loan, one way or another. But we’re going to fight it. Hopefully, the loan officer, who is a friend of my father’s, at the local bank tomorrow will be able to answer a few questions for me, as our attorney does think that they can legally keep us off our of own property.
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope that the situation is resolved quickly, as none of us can take being “basement dwellers” for much longer!
Hope everyone had a better weekend than we did!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Posted by Leigh on August 29, 2008
I hate spam. I hate spammers. I hate the statistics I read on spam, where 33% of users have actually bought stuff from spam emails, because it only means that spamming is going to get worse.
All I can say, is how gullible can you get? How many people actually fall for some of this garbage emails that we receive? Do people really think that multi-millions of dollars are going to come to them through an emailer that doesn’t even know your first name (even when your name is your email)?
This last garbage mail that I received really jumped out at me though and gave me a good laugh.
It’s supposed to be from a bank manager, but it comes from a yahoo email address, under the account name of “Development Bank” (How cheesy), and has a long list of other people it was also mailed to attached. (Guess I can now spam all those other email addresses since he was so nice to give them to me.)
Guess it was meant for all those other people who abandoned millions of dollars in banks around the world!
African Development Bank
NO.97 Tudu Express way Accra,
Accra Ghana.
From the Desk of The Manager, African Development Bank
Attention Beneficiary,
This day, one Allen Jo Walker, came to my office to let us know that you are DEAD, and before your death, you instructed him to come for the claim of your funds in the tune of US$6.2Million that was long abandoned in your name with African Development Bank.
So here comes the big question:
i) Did you authorize Mr. Allen Jo Walker to come for your claim?
ii) Are you truly dead?
If (NO) you are hereby advice as a matter of urgency to reconfirm the details of this message withing 24hours, hence your funds shall be wired into her account without any more delay.
Lastly, you are advice to reconfirm the details of this message and get back immediately with these information’s below:
Full name………………………………
Direct telephone number……………….
address…………………………….
Age……………………….
Occupation………………………..
Bank name…………………………
Bank address…………………………
Bank account…………………………
Account type………………………….
Note: these information’s above must be provided for reconfirmation to enable us make payment to you, hence, your funds will be remit/wire into her account as already provide to this management.
We wait for your urgent response today.
Regards,
The Manager
African Development Bank.
Direct Contact: +233-240-216-473
=====================================
Not to mention all the other holes you can poke in their story:
First off they call you Beneficiary, then they tell me that I have a long abandoned account in my name at their bank. Would that be my real name, or is the account in the name of “Beneficiary” since they don’t really know my name? lol If I really had an account at their bank, wouldn’t they know my name?
Then they are emailing me to find out if I’m dead? Wouldn’t a telephone call be easier? Why can’t they just let me rest in peace! What a crock!
Now what about the horrible English. If this was really coming from a bank manager, it would have his name on it not “The Manager”. And if it was a bank that dealt with Americans much at all, he would also speak perfect English, or at least have a translator that does.
I would love to see statistics on the number of people that fell for this type of email, is there really someone out there that gullible? If so, I’ve got a multi-million dollar deal for them!
Yeah, I’m bored. If I step foot outside, I fear that they’ll have me in a trench some where fishing in the mud for a hammer that was dropped, or something worse, like digging up septic lines again. It’s not always a benefit coming from a construction oriented family. It’s also a dirty job, (But Someone’s Got To Do It! - That’s what i would hear if I spoke up around my family!)
Have a great Labor Day Weekend!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
