Is anyone else going through house buying or selling?
My fiancé and I wanted to move to the suburbs so we bought a house and went through a horrific loan process and escrow. What loan we qualified for changed every day. "You need 200K, no you need 350K, you can't be on the loan but he can . . ." I thought the stress was over but now we're trying to sell my condo in the city and it's grinding me down. I've put on 20 lbs in 4 months. I've been knocked on my rear end by a horrible cold and I'm supposed to be packing to move on Saturday all while having a full time job. All our offers that we received last week on the "offer day" fell through so we have to show the place while we're packing. Am I alone here or is anyone else in exhausting house buying limbo?
We just bought our house a couple months ago. We were lucky to find a house in our price range, the market around here is in a major crunch. But we were in limbo over the appraisal for almost a month and didn't have it until the day of signing. Thankfully we were renting so didn't have to worry about selling but then the landlady wanted us out earlier than expected, by about 2 weeks! Then while we are in middle of move we got a lovely ice storm!
I gained 7 lbs during the process, then had the holidays to deal with. I haven't been able to get back on track completely. Just keep bouncing the same few lbs around.
I love house hunting, so I was a bit disappointed that we found our place after 2 hours of looking with a realtor.
It is a buyer's market right now so selling will be stressful and there are some bargains to be had with buying.
If you can, you might even want to look at renting your condo out. Selling in a buyer's market is difficult but if you can get someone to rent it, it gives you time to wait for the economy to bounce back a little before selling. I have a rental myself due to that reason.
And I personally don't like banks to dictate what you can afford. One thing to do is really sit down and decide your own budget. My husband and I qualified for a much larger loan that we got but we basically told the real estate agent our price range and went with that.
My boyfriend got a really great deal on a wonderful home due to the sellers trying to avoid bankruptcy. Always kinda sucks when a good deal means some one else is having a hard time. He has insanely good credit, but getting a loan was a HUGE pain. He went back and forth on a couple different kind of loans. After going through different loan choices for two months, he worked on one for six months to find out, days before the contract drawn up to hold the seller expired and the day it was supposed to be finalized, that the house was ineligible because the water came from a spring system and there was no local water to hook up to. He was so mad, and the seller told him they were about to back out.The bank had all of this information about the house, and he was told the loan would have absolutely no problems. How he finally bought the house? HE figured out that if he just paid off his four-wheeler (which was such a tiny loan), then he could qualify for one of the loans he tried to get earlier, which he was told he qualified for, then DIDN'T qualify for because of debt-to-income ratio, and then... well... that's the loan he got for the house. He was about to pull his hair out by the end of it.
Last edited by Song of Surly; 01-29-2013 at 08:45 AM.
I love house hunting, so I was a bit disappointed that we found our place after 2 hours of looking with a realtor.
It is a buyer's market right now so selling will be stressful and there are some bargains to be had with buying.
If you can, you might even want to look at renting your condo out. Selling in a buyer's market is difficult but if you can get someone to rent it, it gives you time to wait for the economy to bounce back a little before selling. I have a rental myself due to that reason.
And I personally don't like banks to dictate what you can afford. One thing to do is really sit down and decide your own budget. My husband and I qualified for a much larger loan that we got but we basically told the real estate agent our price range and went with that.
I wish we could rent the condo out but we can't afford it. We need to put the money from the condo into the new house via refinancing (this process never ends!). In my neck of the woods it's a seller's market but my condo is in a lawsuit which puts some financial onus on the owners which makes it hard to sell. So frustrating. Our situation is tricky because i do own the first condo. We do have the money, absolutely, but because of bank rules they won't count everything, including my income, correctly.
Oh wow! I know that emotional roller coaster! Who knew you could feel so many things in such a short period of time.
Fortunately - our house buying process lasted all of two weeks.
Saw the bank on Saturday, saw the house on Sunday, Put an offer in Monday and a house inspection and two weeks later it was done. As "easy" as it was, it was still an emotional roller coaster and my eating was totally affected!
You will make it through this and be able to get back on track. It will be such a relief when you are all settled and can focus on yourself again!
We bought our first house this past summer and the loan process was beyond awful. I walked away with the impression that no wonder rules were needed, because after all these changes there are still some seriously incompetent people out there who have no idea what they're doing...... but the rule changes can't quite fix that, and they instead create their own set of issues. :/
It was SO stressful. I developed bunches of gray hairs overnight (haven't seen one since we finished the process). I have some health issues that had my doctor tell me not to drink any alcohol. I called her one day pleading for 'permission' to have some wine because I was so far beyond coping without some kind of crutch. It was so bad. I never want to go through the process again - or if I do, we will be 5000x choosier about who we go with. Ugh. There's just a lot of mediocrity out there.
Sorry for the rant - I'm still not completely over it, it seems. But you will get past this eventually! Do the best you can to make healthy food choices that give your body support to get through all this and be compassionate to yourself.
Last edited by Desiderata; 01-29-2013 at 11:13 AM.
I really feel for you. My fiancé and I just bought our first house last summer. It was an insanely miserable process. It was a short sale. My bank, the inspector, the appraiser, the sellers, our realtor.... they all were awful. The night before our closing date, we didn't know if we were going to close or not. Four months of CRAZY. I don't know if we will ever move if we have to do it all over again!
We're in the process of buying my grandmother's house as she is moving in with my aunt. The loan process has been atrocious and it's always one excuse after another on why it's taking so long. Of course, some of it was our fault. We lost our W-2's for 2010 and 2011 when we moved the last time. Apparently our tax returns won't suffice even though they show the same things. IRS doesn't keep copies of the W-2 forms, so unable to get help there. I can get mine, my hubby can't because his employer from 2010 and half of 2011 doesn't exist anymore.
It's been a nightmare.
I hope we don't have to go through this again for a long long time. At least we had the house picked out. There is that. It's an old house, needs some work, but I know what I'm getting!
We went through this last year...it was horrible.We had a small house and wanted something bigger,so we put our house up for sale and started looking.I hated having to show the house,because I have two dogs and would have to bring them with me.On nice days it wasn't to bad,because I'd take them for a walk,but there were times when it was pouring.Then when we did get an offer,they had so many hoops to jump through that it took a few months and everyone was at a stand still,from us,to the people who's house we were buying,to the people who's condo they were buying.It was NOT fun.
Is anyone else going through house buying or selling?
It was so bad. I never want to go through the process again - or if I do, we will be 5000x choosier about who we go with. Ugh. There's just a lot of mediocrity out there.
