From finding out whether we will be homeless at the end of May.
I feel completely sick and devastated right now. Add on top of that how stupid I feel for even telling anyone about our “first home.”
As of right now, we no longer are buying “our” townhouse and we have a good chance of not being able to stay in our current apartment.
Everything is just a mess.
Let me rewind a bit.
A couple weeks ago, we got preapproved for the exact townhouse I showed you pictures of in my last post. We put in an offer, got the offer accepted, and were told that as long as nothing went wrong with transferring the title, we didn’t spend tons of money, and Mr. CS didn’t lose his job, the final approval process would go smoothly. We were already preapproved for that home. The mortgage officer already had all w2’s, tax returns, etc., during the preapproval process, so we assumed he had been thorough when preapproving us. I don’t really want to go into all the details for security reasons, but basically we were 99% certain the home was going to be ours.
Once we heard all of that, we paid $300 to have an inspection that went pretty well overall. We spent some time last weekend checking out our new neighborhood. We learned that there was a huge, beautiful horse farm just down the road which melted my heart because I felt like we had a part of the country in the city. We couldn’t wait to move in and call it our home.
We dreamed of brining our first baby home to that house.
We dreamed of buying a dog this summer.
We dreamed of going running in the safe neighborhood, of house warming parties, and of beautiful gray and aqua walls.
We dreamed of paying off our student loans in five years.
We dreamed of finally having a place of our own that was cheaper than our current apartment.
Since it had already been a week and half since we had the offer accepted and we had only heard positive news about the final loan approval, we gave our notice on our apartment. We gave it a little less than two weeks early because there was another young couple, just like us, who were interested in renting our property and they had to give their notice soon.
Then, this week, our mortgage officer called us and basically tried to talk us out of the house. We should have seen it as a major warning sign, but I was so busy this week working on filming myself in the classroom and doing hours and hours of work to get my teaching license that I just assumed he was looking out for us. He told us that because this property did not accept FHA loans and the loan it does qualify for is much stricter than FHA that we would have more money if we bought an FHA-approved property. This made no sense because he told us while we were getting preapproved that the monthly payment would be comparable to what it would be as an FHA loan. We were so confused about him dissuading us because this was our dream first house (at least in that price range). However, we just blew it off.
Then, he called later in the week and told us that we were “cutting it close” and that when he ran our numbers through a program, it said we were approved, but when he manually entered them, it said we were not. He promised us he would let us know by Friday if we would get the home or not.
Mr. CS had the day off yesterday and waited by the phone all day. When he didn’t get a call, he called the mortgage officer because come Monday, the young couple will be coming to see our apartment and will most likely put in an application on it. The officer again basically told us nothing concrete, but told us it looked bad. He said he would let us know for sure on Monday.
Well, after talking to my parents about it (who had talked to him on the phone as well), we learned that we got scammed. He basically told us that we weren’t getting the house without officially telling us, probably because he didn’t have the you-know-what to tell us that he messed up and never should have preapproved us for the house in the first place. I honestly think he didn’t think they would accept our low-ball offer, so he preapproved us for it anyway. That, or he just didn’t spend the time doing a thorough preapproval and didn’t want to admit his error after the offer was accepted.
We called our realtor last night and his exact words (coming from a man who has been completely professional) were “Oh sh*t.” He could not believe this happened. He felt horrible. He said he had never heard of anything like this happening once someone was already preapproved when no financial changes were made. The loan should have gone through as long as something with the seller didn’t go wrong and we maintained our income and debt, which we did.
After looking at our preapproval letter more closely and learning more about the final approval process, I know this should have never happened. We should not be preapproved one day and then told that we don’t make enough money for the house or have too much student debt the next day. If that could happen, what would the thorough preapproval process with all tax returns, w2’s, and student loan info be for?
The worst part about it is that we didn’t learn about all of this until last night when our landlord’s office was already closed for the weekend. We left a frantic voicemail message and also emailed them begging them to let us retract our lease termination letter. The couple who wants our apartment is coming to see it on Monday. We are praying that the office will allow us to renew our lease so we can have a place to live until we are ready to look for a house again.
I feel like a complete prick now because this other couple really wanted our apartment and now have their hopes up that they are going to get it. They may still get it and we will be in a frantic search for a place to live once our lease is up.
This whole thing is a disaster. I felt like I got hit by a train when I woke up this morning because of the emotional toll this has put on us. Thankfully, my faith in God only gets stronger through these situations and my relationship with my husband will not suffer because of some person who completely broke our trust. I’m praying that he doesn’t do this to anyone else.
The moral of the story is to pick your mortgage officers carefully, to not be quick to trust others, and to not get too attached to a house until you are living in it (and maybe not even then).
Ugh. I hope you all had a better week. I’m ready to crawl into a hole for a while, but I need to be strong.
It’s just a house.
