Get a loan

Well..I got a federal plus loan and apparently I can use it to cover my summer classes through a loophole. Yay!! My student account shows it waiting for me…now it’s just time to cancel the other approved loans…. :P As much as I cringe to owe around 35,000 in loans now.. it doesn’t deter me from continuing my education at a wonderful school.

Well, FAFSA appears to think my stepfather’s income matters and has declined me any aid. Yet when applying for federal parent plus loans, they don’t recognize him as a parent. My school’s special circumstance program appears to have rejected my family’s obvious need for assistance. And all the private loans are highly variable in their rates.

I do not know what will happen in the next 11 days…

I’ve been looking at alternative loans since I’m dirt poor and I have no aid from Loyola. Therefore, I’ll be trying to get one from Citibank or Wachovia or something. Jeez, I need like 25,000 just for this year alone. Next year…probably more!

Now that we have a closing date and all of our paperwork in, I’m going to mark this as done. They’ll hand over our cash at the closing, but we have a binding agreement to buy our house! I can’t wait…

We’ve submitted our paperwork and the bank has confirmed that we’ve sent them everything they need for now. We should know really soon!

It’s just really tough to get a mortgage right now. I heard from my sister that she knows a couple in LA where both of them are attorneys and they are having trouble qualifying for a mortgage. It actually worries me since I’ll be selling my home soon. We have really tough requirements to buy a coop apartment here in NYC that rule out exotic mortgages, but prices are high so we do need bigger loans. I have insanely good credit and we’re putting a good chunk of cash down, so if we’re having trouble, my buyers will be in the same boat.

On Thursday we got all sorts of paperwork in the mail. Some of it is just things to file away, but a lot of it was stuff to read and sign. This weekend [today!] I have to go through it all…

I did put in our deposit for our new loan. After the last one, I’m still not counting our chickens before they hatch, but we are getting closer to final paperwork and all that jazz…

Apparently, I have a date with my boyfriend and some light reading when I get home… Yay! We might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel… or not…

I’m not the only one having issues with the current mortgage market—one of my friends applied for a mortgage at my main bank, but by the time she got the paperwork approved by the coop board, that bank had closed the whole division that handled HELOCs! They lost that deposit and have to start over. Yikes! What’s amazing to me is that we’re having trouble when both of us have good strong credit scores. In particular, my friend’s HELOC is nothing out of the ordinary. On the BBC the other day, they had a few snippets of things on Have Your Say about people who were “feeling the pinch”, but no one mentioned people applying for mortgages, just credit cards and people whose APRs were going up.

My boyfriend’s loan fell through for a stupid and arcane reason. Since my money will be coming from a different source and I won’t be on his mortgage, my cash is considered a “gift” to him, and the bank won’t let people accept gifts from non-relatives. I can either funnel it through one of his relatives and set us all up for hefty gift taxes or we can get married. I am not going to let a freaking bank tell me when and where to get married.

Tomorrow morning, we’re both shopping around for new loans. I paid a mortgage origination fee on my place and I need to call and get that back if I can. They took my money even though they knew the situation weeks before I started talking to them. I especially don’t like that I got a call from my mortgage guy right after he told my boyfriend about this mess and he didn’t mention any of it to me! Grr. You can’t just drop one of us. We’re a package deal here.

I read through the notes to my future mortgage and… I know they want people to understand what they’re getting into, but no wonder they don’t! It took me 45 minutes to get through their guidebook and paperwork, and while I honestly read it to understand it, I didn’t go through their “do it yourself” math exercises. No wonder people are in trouble with sub-prime loans… I didn’t understand how my mortgage really worked until I was halfway through the book and I have an MS and have always read the fine print on my financial documents. Their booklet was vaguely helpful, but it was definitely not an easy read or well laid out. I slogged through four or five “disclosures” that were pretty redundant [apparently this bank owns businesses that do mortgage insurance and other products, and there was a separate disclosure for each of those links]. The worksheet that listed the actual estimated payments for my mortgage was much clearer, but I only got to it after I waded through the rest of the paperwork.

In any case, I turned my paperwork over to the bank before work this morning and I’ll hear from them soon.