Quick homebuying update

This is going to be exceedingly boring for most of you; sorry.

The inspection of what will hopefully be my new house in Quincy went well. There’s a bit of work to do in the bathroom that I hadn’t realized, but it’s relatively minor and not hugely urgent. The electrical boxes should be replaced with a more modern one. (Fuses! Whee!) There are a couple things to keep an eye on in the plumbing. The chimney needs repointing. There's some settling, and the temporary posts should be replaced with real lolly (sp?) posts. But basically it’s in very good shape. I signed the P&S.

I got my loan approvals for that purchase, contingent on the usual array of further documentation. Only...

The most important piece of that documentation is a “verification of mortgage and 12-month payment history” with my name on it, for our current house. I’d called on Thursday and asked for that to be faxed to my mortgage broker. When it mysteriously didn’t arrive on Friday, he asked me to contact the lender again.

Here’s the thing. Originally there were five of us on the mortgage. In 2000, three of us bought the other two out, and filled out “assumption of mortgage” paperwork. It looks like they removed the wrong people from the mortgage — they removed me, and left one of the people we bought out on the note.

This explains why my (new) mortgage broker hasn’t seen that mortgage on my credit report. It explains why I’ve never been able to use the (old) lender’s web site or phone system, which require my Social Security number. And it explains why getting that verification of mortgage with my name on it has been so hard, and why it looks to be a mad scramble to get everything fixed and updated in time for me to close on my new place. (The bridge loan needs to close before the actual mortgage, so I can use it as my down payment.)

The worrisome thing is that the lender’s customer support people are being very chary with details. I can’t get out of them whether they’ve actually found documentation that I should be on the note or not. I did hear that they sent email their name-change department today, but I don’t know whether that email says “Hey, we screwed up; please fix this” or it says “Geez, this crackpot thinks he should be on this note”. I suppose the ability to say “our records are incorrect and we promise to fix them” is probably well above the pay grade of the people who answer the phones, but it still leaves me in limbo. And the last person I talked to said if this were going to be fixed, it would probably take until Wednesday to fix, and only after that could I request a copy of the document my mortgage broker needs. And all of this is already very very tight, since the person I’m buying from needs to close on the 31st, so she can close on her new house.

All that said, I’m not as stressed as this sounds. I’ve done all I can on that front until Monday. I’ve kicked into motion a process that will hopefully end with this fixed. And since all I can do about that particular thing until Monday is wait, I’m going to do other things.

Two possessions I really, really appreciate these days

There are two possessions I’ve really been appreciating over the last couple of weeks:

• My cordless (Bluetooth) mobile-phone headset, which lets me type while on the phone and use the phone more (!) safely and comfortably in the car.
• My printer/scanner/copier, which lets me make all the copies I need to make.

That is all. Yay, I get to see cathijosephine soon!