Documents you need to obtain a mortgage when you are conventionally employed.
- tax returns
- pay stabs or w-2
- bank statements
- gift letters, in case you’re borrowing money from family
- photo ID
Documents you need to obtain a mortgage when you are self-employed and you are a writer.
And now it is your turn to tell me the stories about your battles with paperwork. Let’s start this Monday right. 🙂
OUCH! I offer virtual chocolate and hugs! We just refi’ed and that was painful. this is not enviable
So, bad paperwork story:
I mentioned we just re-fi’d, well the day after we met to sign the paperwork to get solar panels on our roof (we didn’t want anything messing up the refi and it had taken about 2 months get an actual slot because everyone was getting new rates). When we got to the loan paperwork for the panels — and we were sitting between the mortgage companies/looked like we had 2x 1st mortgages in the cue, that got to be extensive on the document support. We ended up just sending them the whole 140+ page scanned refi-paperwork document to get everything they needed. — Jan 23rd
Then they tried to tell us we were missing bits of information (“No, look through the giant scanned stack”)…. and the survey people only gave us a day notice before they were coming to inspect the roof — which involved them needing to get into the attic and we both are out in the world work (lab scientist and a safety officer). The did the exterior evaluation, wanted us to email them photos of the interior — we made a scheduled date for them to come and do the interior….. then those photos didn’t load up. They came back again March 26th, re-took the interior photos and we finally have that loaded up.
Now we wait for the design and then have to petition the HOA (which as 30 days to get back to us) while the solar company gets a county permit ect… and then install.
Meanwhile this is all holding up our planned, unpermitted, rehabbing of our deck (New pours, pulling off the old rotted planking, putting down a new surface and rails ect — but the foot print stays the same so it is very liberally defined as a ‘repair’) because we don’t want to have inspectors coming and asking uncomfortable questions. I guess I’ll be getting a summer tan working on the deck at this rate.
I work in mortgage at a large bank, and the only thing worse than having to ask some poor borrower for all of that is reading through it all and then realizing that you need three more things…
I’m an underwriter. Self employed borrowers during covid are just in for a world of hurt, I feel so bad. I also dread those loans. *raises coffee cup wearily in solidarity*
At least they’re not doing an FHA loan with say a 4th borrower who suddenly sent their savings to their mom in another country…… right in the middle of the loan.
I bought a house with my sister 10 years ago. Last year I bought her out.
Turns out due to an error by a solicitor 10 years ago with single word I nearly lost the lot.
A process that should have taken 8 weeks took 7 months and lots of tears and tantrums.
I had to get signed and witnessed documents from my parents, My sister, my former solicitor.
I feel your pain. Oh it’s my house now 😁
Been there…
some family….painful
What was the single word that almost derailed it all if you don’t mind my asking?
Uggghhhh we were conventionally employed. This is crazy. You must have to take organizing to a different level.
We just did the first one, plus some, but I have a friend who is self employed and when she bought her house several years ago, it took about three months longer than it should have, I’m sure she had to prove all the same stuff you do, and she had to put more down, because the bank didn’t believe she actually had the funds to buy a house.
Our family went through the immigration process is the late 90s. We meaning me the person with the best handwriting had the pleasure of filling all those forms. And refilling if form updated and needed to be refiled…
Mom had to make sure she had copies of all requested documents in triplicate.
My hand cramps just thinking about it.
When I lost my husband I sold our house and decided to rent. I just couldn’t live in that house without him. I’m happily a renter now. Really a smart decision since I’ve moved twice since he passed for new jobs. And my current job I travel extensively, or did prior to this lovely virus 🦠🤨, so renting is best for me.
We of the BDH promise to purchase enough of your books to let you afford to buy a mansion for cash.
Sorry. This is a comment to my favorite authors, not a reply
I merely promise to buy everything you publish as a ebook so you get a larger slice of the pie. I cannot promise cash mansion level purchases. 😁
My first experience with the home buying/selling thing was as a seller. My aunt put everything into a trust and lucky me, I was the trustee. I got ~extremely~ lucky because overall the process was fairly smooth.
The only hiccup- all the usual documents you have to sign. I had to sign them: Xxxxxx Xxxx Xxxxx, successor trustee of the Mxxxxxxx X Xxxxxxx Living Trust U/T/D Dated June 26, xxxx. All that, on that single itty bitty signature line on Every. Single. Document.
Ah the joys of house buying and selling. In England you can put an offer on a property and have it accepted but it’s not legally yours until you’ve ‘exchanged contracts’ and the process for this takes at least 6 weeks, more usually 8-10.
15 years ago when buying my first flat i got gazumped 3-4 times (your offer is accepted and then you get shafted by the seller when a better deal comes along).
Just moved again last month and the whole process took nearly 5 months! Due to Covid-related temporary property tax relief the UK property market is booming. I had to wait 5 weeks for a survey. Then my buyer’s solicitors found a minor error on the leasehold – something was outlined in green and not red and a hedge had been cut back on the front drive. Correcting this took an extra 2 weeks, multiple forms for both me and my downstairs neighbour to complete (& few hundred extra pounds to pay for mine and her forms) and after all that it still turned out there was another error no one had seen until the day before the exchange of contracts. Argh
And I was simultaneously dealing with a purchase and trying to declutter 10 years worth of stuff by myself in lockdown where all shops are shut and I could barely get into the recycling centre to leave donations / throw stuff.
Since the move I’ve realised the paperwork has increased due to all the changing addresses on documents, informing insurers, finding a new GP etc… goes on.
I’m just glad I now have a garden to sit in whilst dealing with the paperwork!
LOL i was told i had 3 months to move my son and i out of the Apt we where renting. I found a Condo in the next town over. My father had just retired from a company of 40 years. we put in an offer of cash and they excepted. The day before the closing they tell us that we need to show where the money was coming from. REALLY WE ARE PAYING IN CASH. long story short they made my dad SO MAD that he went to the Band and walked in with the entire amount in pocket change. (dimes, nickles and quartors) 🙂 I got my Condo they got a headack. 🙂
HAHA this makes me laugh, this must have been multiple pallets worth of coin buckets…
When Hubby and I sold our first home, we faced a pile of paperwork over two inches thick, each requiring our initials or signature or both. We were even selling it to a family friend, but the paperwork gods demanded their due.
It’s insane.
My heart goes out to you.
Just think what a valuable experience this would be for the occupiers of said house. You should make sure they are sharing in the valuable life lessons to be learned whilst securing a domicile for them. Nothing like red tape, two or three requests for paperwork already sent, and the instant nausea and headache when the lien officer’s name pops up when the phone rings. And then you get to make it yours, decisions decisions and more $$$ which you insert into your “spare” time while meeting all your daily activities. Welcome to adulthood!
The IRS once said I owed them money, rather than them owing me money as usual. This was back in the mid ’80s, no chance of settling online. No chance of getting anyone on the phone, either. Upon examination, they had read one of my amount lines backwards and upside down (909 vs. 606 if memory serves).
I no longer recall the number of letters I sent them. The final one was in the thickest Sharpie I could find, all caps. Yeah, I know. I *know*. Nevertheless, it worked. I got my refund, with interest owed.
The following year, that interest from the IRS – less than $5.00 – put me over the line into the next higher tax bracket.
I still don’t mind paying taxes. Having a safe food supply, safe travel, safe vaccines and medications, and a military to defend us is a bargain at the price IMO. But I was quite annoyed at the time.
I had this experience as well. The IRS misplaced the decimal for my income on a part time job (Dog training one night a week) The actual amount was $600 for the year. IRS said I made $60,000. Took 3″ of paperwork and 8 weeks to sort it out and I am STILL, 5 years later, getting ripper-cushions from it!
The IRS sent me reams of threats and fines because they said I failed to report income. What they actually did was take a W2 from one year and apply it to the next. I had to photocopy everything from two years taxes and send to them along with a letter explaining how stupid they were. I demanded a written acknowledgement of their error. Months later I got a post card saying “I no longer needed to concern myself with that matter.” Cracked me up.
My husband and I bought our first house ever (located in far west tx) in November. I’m conventionally employed by the federal government, but have so so many student loans and he works in the oilfields of the Permian Basin – which is as unconventional as ‘conventional’ employment gets. We had to submit paystubs from each of his employers for the last 4 years, we had to get letters certifying overtime, we had to write explanations for why he had multiple employers, we had to send in documentation for student loan payments. It seemed like I would turn stuff in and then get a call the next day asking for me to unearth more financial history.
Having the house is awesome, buying it is a bitter battle.
I never want to do this again.
Let’s just say that I’m very, very glad I’m conventionally employed with a good salary and we just don’t use our company as an income source. We’re starting the process of buying property to build our forever\retirement home.
Just getting hubby a driver’s license in our new state is a royal PITA because they accept 1099 but not K1 because somehow hubby’s SS card has been misplaced with our huge move.
If possible, talk with the Social Security office (or go online) to get a replacement card. Once you find the original card, shred it, or keep it in a safe place just in case the other card is lost.
I’m in the process of building my first home with significant help from my parents. The amount of paperwork they had to provide for closing ended up leading my mom to drop the f-bomb during a meeting with the bank representative because she was so frustrated with the hoops they were making my parents jump through.
Good luck with your taxes! At least the tax filing deadline was pushed back to May 17th!
OMG 😲 That is unreal 😳 Sending virtual 💐and gummy bears sprinkled with lots of patience
Yup. Started trying to buy a building for my business. Began in October of 2020 and didn’t finally close until Feb. 2021. Had to turn in every piece of document known to man. The more diverse you are with where you keep your money, the worse it is as well. I feel you.
I am very sorry, but I had to laugh. I am married to an accountant, and he has reams of papers for every occasion, it seems. Then I looked at the papers and asked where something specific was because I didn’t see it, so he had to add more reams of paper. Our closets are filled with boxes of papers. We keep digital copies of everything in two or three places, as well as printed versions, and then I copy all the digital files to one thumb drive per year and that hogs all the space there, too. This is why my computer has a 300TB backup drive. It’s only half full so far, but it’s getting there. His computer crashed one day and the dance to restore files only on that one was not fun, so I became Mrs. Backup. My first backup drive got too full, so I got a bigger one.
The main thing is that you have the files. And you have the income to pay the mortgage and can prove it, so you’ll get through it all. Being self-employed is the problem when it comes to what you need to prove you’re not a deadbeat, as if paying your bills all your life doesn’t prove that. You’re organized, as least, with no shoebox filled with random receipts. I have no doubt that you will be victorious in this struggle.
Thank you for making me laugh. I needed that.
It’s so frustrating that rent doesn’t count towards ability to pay a mortgage.
It depends on what state you’re in. It does in MD. Or did a decade ago.
I can cheer this Monday up 😊
Here in the UK it’s Easter Monday, a national Bank holiday. I’d ran out of milk yesterday and the supermarket was closed for Easter Sunday but back open today so I popped in.
Normally you don’t see the Easter stuff reduced until at least tomorrow for those last minute late egg buyers.
So I was extremely pleased to see them already cut price by 80% and am relaxing on the sofa in a chocolate induced stupor with two more large eggs waiting in the cupboard 😉😁 #EasterEggcitement
Thank you, Ilona Andrews for the educational and informative post.
I feel your pain.
A word of advice—- Make sure no one hears you use Patricia Briggs mechanic power words in English when someone— lawyer or finance person— tells you you need another form. They always seem to want something else and it has to be notarized etc.
Good luck.
Your ha ha for a Monday— Titan, the knucklehead pup, “lost” the cat and I on his off leash walkabout yesterday. So he went home by himself after he finished deer tracking and couldn’t find us. The rest of household was very upset that we were “lost” when the cat and I got back home from walk. Titan Had hysterics. Sigh. Sigh sigh
I once had to file taxes for my time working in Japan. My paperwork included tax documents in Japanese.
We refinanced a FHA 30 year to a 15 year conventional. We also have leased solar panels. What should have been a month took 4 because we didn’t know what exactly the mortgage company wanted. “We need to see what happens if you default” Page 2 section 4, “No, what will happen if you default?” Page 2, section 4.
“No…” on repeat until they finally asked for something different FROM the solar company. So I reached out to Solar, and had it in 6 hours.
This company made me cry on two occasions.
That being said, I’d highly recommend them if you don’t leave your solar, if you do lease it, call the solar company too and tell them you’re refinancing.
I’ve feel like heard this leased solar with refi tip elsewhere, too.
We close on our refi next week, and it wasn’t so bad (conventional employment, and we did the refinance through the same credit union our original mortgage through). Buying the place 7 years ago, however, was terrible. I had a collections thing that was loooong paid off but not closed out correctly, and I think I spent a month on the phone with them every single day until someone managed to push the right button.
We had just moved states and were renting while looking for a place to buy, and at some point in the move we lost our Social Security cards. The credit union required copies. So we spent 2.5 hours on our 10th wedding anniversary waiting in the SSA office to request new ones, as you could walk out the door with them instead of waiting for weeks by mail.
I am governmental and have an extensive knowledge about home loans. Spouse is self employed so I understand all about the extra forms. Our closing was the worst. We refinanced a second home that was bought as an investment and has always been rented. We made clear it was not our primary residence and made it clear in all loan paperwork that it was a rental. We showed up to close and the paperwork was for a single family home primary residence. The closer kept trying to insist it was okay to sign. After pointing out the various certifications “I certify that information is correct”, explaining my background, and how this would be loan fraud and qualify as making false statements on a mortgage loan application, we walked out of the first closing. We went back a second time and they were so upset that we read every page in the package. So not sorry that we don’t trust the loan folks.
We closed on a refinance on our primary home during the pandemic. The closer was not wearing a mask. I was worried my spouse was about to lose it. Yay, red state of Texas.
I feel your pain and wish you the best.
I too read every line of every sheet of the closing documents. I warn them when they set up the appointment. Twice I have found errors in our favor and once in the lender’s favor. It is nicer that you can do it on line – – – no one has to burn their afternoon while I read.
Ugh. Y’all have my sympathies. At least folks know HOW to process the sale. My mom recently retired and moved cross country to be closer to me which involved selling her fully paid for house and purchasing a new home. She had the funds and no desire to have a mortgage at this stage so was purchasing outright. Getting a straight answer about the exact amount needed and how to transfer the funds took literally weeks and calls, emails, and texts from at least half a dozen people. They kept saying “the lender will take care of that” and having trouble understanding THERE IS NO LENDER, the $$ is coming from a checking account and we need an amount and a routing number to arrange the wire transfer. Was getting to the point where a suitcase full of cash wasn’t sounding completely ridiculous. We eventually got it worked out but what should have been the easiest type of sale – cash in full from the buyer – confused the heck outta folks. Real Estate contracts are a pita at for the most common situations, it only increases when you are an exception to the “norm.”
My partner and I bought our first house almost exactly one year ago. We closed and moved in and one week later went into pandemic lockdown. Needless to say, it’s been an interesting first year. My credit is fair, and borderline at best. Thanks, childhood poverty and student loans, whoohoo! Anyway, getting the approval for the mortgage was was a miracle and getting our interest rate as low as we did was the shock of our lives. However–EVERYTHING very nearly fell through entirely one week before closing. I had some emergency dental work and was making payments. The dentist, who I love, accidentally drafted my pay installment a week early and this *overdrafted my checking.* It became an exercise in begging, phone calling, crying, and letter writing but FINALLY our lender cleared it…with about 2 days to spare.
Bought land with a home with a loan from the local Farm Credit. Easiest process I’ve ever been through. And I’m self employed as well
It was a pain in the you know what when we financed our home (even though we owned it free and clear , the things you do for a new roof) I can imagine the pain of doing one without the typical documents needed……just glad I am not the one that has to do it…….
I’m a college professor, so I’ve always had a 9- or 10-month contract, depending on the specific institution.
When I moved in 2011 & bought a house, the procedures had all tightened after the 2008-2009 crash.
It was annoying but mostly tolerable until the mortgage company called to interrogate me (that’s how it really felt” about the “gap in my employment”.
Me: What gap? I’ve been employed full-time since August 2003.
Them: This upcoming May to August.
Me: I’m a professor. That’s summer break. I have a 9-month work contract, but get paid over 12 months.
Them: [Mutterings of doom & gaps & payment concerns]
Me: 🤨 Still summer
When I was appealing a denial of nursing services for my daughter, I ended up doing this appeals process with the state where you’re required, up front, to provide all the documents that you might ever need to make your case. That is, if they argue A and you refute with B, you have to have provided a medical journal article to support that in the initial case. Trying to preemptively guess everything you might need is stressful, and I can’t imagine people with less education in the sciences being able to navigate the process.
That’s so cruel😩
We won our appeal, at least, but yeah, it’s pretty rough
To move my cats to Austria, they needed a USDA certificate (1,5 hour drive each way & $200), each had to have a chip and a fresh rabies shot (vet visit ~$300, IIRC, but they had other stuff done, too), apostilles (the international version of notarizations) for both (3 hour drive each way and another $100), and finally a vet visit day of flight to ensure they were safe to fly.
And my new husband winked & grinned at the customs agent, who then waved us through. She did ask if they were worth anything, to which my beloved replied that the paperwork on them was worth more.
I’ve never been so annoyed. I told him he should have mentioned his mad skills, and I could’ve save hundreds of bucks, days of time, and fast-talking the vet that morning.
Still doesn’t come close to your list.
The paperwork to be a kinship guardian and then become a certified foster parent is a nightmare. Pages and pages. The same information on multiple forms. The same exact page randomly inserted in different documents. The same form completed for multiple branches within the same organization and then with an outsourced agency. One social worker described the process as exhaustive and intrusive, and it is definitely true!
Paperwork sucks! but at least it seems you are fairly organized :). I worked in an attorney’s office that also did tax accounting (and we primarily handled real estate and estates) and let me tell you, some people’s accounts are an organizational nightmare.
My worst paperwork nightmare came from the time I was living and working in Illinois but my residency was in Iowa (grad student). It wouldn’t have been an issue except that I grew up right on the Mississippi – locally, most businesses just know to file the appropriate tax documents for people who are working across state lines. It never occurred to me that the reason they all automatically do that, is because the border is so close that a large percentage of the population works on the other side of the river. So I never thought to go over the situation with the university. Once I realized the error, the actual documentation sent to the states wasn’t that difficult, but working my way through the university accounting office. You need what? Why would you need that? But how can you be a resident of Iowa if you work here? Then don’t you just pay your taxes in Iowa? Well why would you have paid taxes in Illinois? Yes, of course I know we withhold state taxes! So you need a form to get that corrected? Okay… that’s not really something I can help you with. Let me pass you off to Person #2, who is just as clueless and will require all of the same explanations again.
Person #4 eventually figured out what I needed to sign to correct my withholding. Two pieces of paper.
In our province The government completely changed the way the electronic forms are created and then added a new registry called the Land Owner transparency registry which was created to avoid the very real money laundering issues that occurred ( Asian and South American gangs were using dark banks to ship money into the country then using gamblers to procees it via casinos where after that it was put into luxury cars to be sent back to Asia to be resold at 3x the price or into real estate here where they would sit on the property for 6 months and then sell for a profit and have a legitimate explanation for the source of money. The neat trick was multi-million$ pieces of property being bought by students with no mortgage.) So as a person who files transfer and mortgage documents for clients we had to learn how to deal with all the new forms and requirements in the space of about three months. So paperwork, yes I understand. Also qualifications on mortgages changed after the last crash here. The stress test for people getting a mortgage is a far higher bar than before. People who qualified ten years ago often don’t qualify to renew now without getting a guarantor or putting another party on title with a small fractional interest. From the 80’s to now the housing market here has gone crazy. Houses that were selling at $30,000 in 1986 are now valued at 1 or 2 million$ because of the land value. An apartment here on my street was bought for redevelopment. Each one of the units sold at between $500,000 to 1 million$ but the developmerknows they can make triple that when their new condo tower is selling units.
I am a mortgage loan processor in the Austin area and man, I cringe just thinking of all the extra documentation you need. Self-employed files are the worst. At least you’ve gone through the process before, so it wasn’t a major shock. Best of luck!
When I was 19, I needed a photo ID to go to Canada (so so long ago, but just after 9/11) and didn’t have a driver’s license. At the DMV my Mom and I got into a cyclical argument with the manager who insisted i needed a photo ID, like a driver’s license, to get a photo ID. The ‘If I had a driver’s license, I wouldn’t need a photo ID’ argument was not working. It was because we didn’t have an official address, rural Appalachia is just now getting to that. In the end we had to have a notary to stamp a document, that I was my mother’s daughter, lived at home, and indeed needed a photo ID. It was insanity. Later when I did get my license, they would not accept thier own photo ID as proof of identity.
It could get worse. My younger son was applying for a mortgage with BoA, where he has multiple accounts. They demanded to know why he was letting a woman live in his apartment without contributing to the rent.
“Because we’ve been married since January.” (Holds up hand with wedding band on left ring finger.)
“You have proof?”
BofA! When I first got married I had had a checking account with them for about 6 years. This was back when you went to the same bank regularly and knew all the tellers! We were given quite a few checks as wedding gifts, made out to Mr and Mrs… or to me but with my married name. We were from LA and got married there but my husband was temporarily stationed in Northern CA for 3 months prior to our wedding and 2 weeks after, then we were moving to FL for flight school. We weren’t even in town when the movers came, my in laws handled that. We didn’t want to travel with that many uncashed checks and it was a good amount of money so we went to my bank, in person, the day after our wedding, before going on our honeymoon, to deposit them in my account. We had all of our ids, passports and legal paperwork for our marriage but they kept insisting I couldn’t deposit the checks because they weren’t made out to me. I wasn’t even trying to cash them, I just wanted the money safely deposited in case things got lost while we were traveling/moving! I had to get the manager involved and agree to putting a 2 week hold on the funds before they would let me deposit the checks. Oh BofA 😛
I live in an apartment. Always lived in an Apartment. Now ,I definitely need to stay in put.
When my friend’s dad died it was a battle of wits to sell the house. 2 out of 3 wanted to sell. The third wanted to hang on to the house but refused to pay the taxes on the house.
It took over 3 years of negotiations to decide to sell the house. Then several months to get a realtor they all agreed to use. It was finally sold.
Happy spring to everyone.
.
I can’t match the paperwork requirements you have. I was self-employed briefly in the mid-1980s but at that time we bought a double-wide with what was basically a glorified auto loan, so no “mortgage” per se. I got a state job shortly thereafter, from which I am now retired. We’ve done a fair # of mortgage/refinances since. We had always used Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) because my mom worked there for 43 years and I had some kind of misplaced loyalty. Tons of paperwork and many, many dropped balls. The last time we used them, our attorney flatly refused to work with them again. For the last mortgage and 2 refinances we have used Quicken/Rocket mortgage and I can’t sing their praises highly enough. Everything is done online or by phone, and someone comes TO YOU to close at your home or a venue of your choice. About as painless as it gets.
I was widowed 4 years ago. After trying to stay in the house I shared with my husband, I realized I needed to move. (Every time I heard a car door, I expected him to be home.)
The area was great and I’d lived close for 30 plus years, so I bought a house in a new development a few blocks away. (Actually, I had the house built because I’d never had a house that I liked all of. Lots of compromise in the previous houses.)
I have been retired since 2014, when my long time employers retired and closed their retail store. At 64, it was hard enough to find a new job that I gave up. It’s not like I love retail. And my husband was still working.
The poor loan officer at the credit union kept asking for employment info and I had to keep reminding her that I had the income (Social Security, my late husband’s pension, and IRA distributions), but was not working.
She gave me a list of what she needed and then kept finding something else that she had to have right away. Not only did I have to find the documentation, I had to drive it to the credit union to give it to her.
It eventually worked out, but I was really ticked a few times…
My late husband’s family has a genetic hiccup that results in the inability to have fingerprint impressions “take”. So anything that requires fingerprints (getting Global Entry, working in a civil or governmental position, or in the finance field) results in a lot of frowning, “let me check with a manager”, and are-you-a-spy
glowering. They have physician’s documentation but we learned to allow about three hours for phone calls or appointments for anything requiring fingerprints.
My fingerprints don’t take with most digital equipment. I had no idea until I tried to get a government job. I had to find a police station that still did it the old fashioned way. And the one guy who still knew how to do it was retired, so I had to wait until he had time to come in and do it. And still he had to make multiple tries before he got a clean set. I’m not sure fingerprints are as reliable as we think they are.
On the upside, you have done it so often, you have a folder with everything you need just waiting for the next purchase. Or is that a down side? You could be a loan officer if you got bored with feeding the BDH. But please don’t.
I feel your pain, Ilona. If the government (whether it’s federal, state or local) can be convoluted in anything, it will.
This reminded me of when I was younger, and had to find my dad’s mom’s green card since my dad was putting his mom into a nursing home. After I found it, and read off the numbers, the person from social security said “there should be one more number”. We said “there are no more numbers. We are reading it directly off the green card we have.” Come to find out, after talking with the immigration office, that the green card my dad’s mom had was a temporary green card. She never planned to stay in the U.S. However, WWII put a crimp in her plans to go back to Germany. She never worked outside the house, and didn’t have her own social security number. What saved us was a law was put into place grandfathering all the women who came to the U.S as a result of WWII to become U.S. citizens. This was before the internet so digital copies were not available. We were all breathing a sigh of relief.
Another instance was when my dad died, and my mom and I were wondering what to do with a funeral. My dad was in the Air Force, so I mentioned to her to find anything that had his service record. We found two pieces of paper. One was his first enlistment and the other was his second enlistment. The first enlistment was at the end of the Korean War, so he was able to have his ashes buried in the national cemetery in St. Louis. When we talked to the funeral director, she said that it was good we had the paperwork since the military archives in St. Louis burned down. Again this was before the internet, so digital copies were not available.
One thing to remember everyone, make sure you have certified copies of everything especially death certificates. Everyone will want certified copies. I had to do this for everyone in my family who passed over the years. Make sure when you order the certified copies you order two more than what you think. This way you have a copy for you, and one other for someone you forgot to list.
Paperwork…the bane of everyone’s existence.
Yes! I am a conventional mortgage underwriter and manager, and the new Covid self-employed guidelines are crazy, and underwriters hate them just as much as borrowers 🙁
Two years personal and business tax returns, 2020 profit and loss statement (if taxes are not done yet), year to date profit and loss statement, and three months business bank statements to support the YTD profit and loss statement and to show that the business is still stable with the ongoing pandemic.
Then we might need a letter of explanation from the borrower to understand how the funds move in and out of the business bank statements in order to help support that the business is still stable… It’s kind of the worst.
We bought two houses in our time living in New York state. For the first house I had to sign with any “alias” I’d ever had. So every variation of first name, middle name, maiden name, and nickname. So if my name was Jennifer Ann Smith, with a maiden name of Jones, and a nickname of Jen. I would have:
Jennifer Smith
Jennifer Jones
Jennifer A Jones
Jen Smith
Jennifer A Smith
Jennifer A Jones Smith
Jennifer Ann Jones
Jennifer Ann Smith
ETC.
It was ridiculous. It was a full page of signatures.
With our other house the mortgage company required everything be signed in quintuplet. Even the attorneys (because yes a real estate attorney is required in NY) said it was excessive and the most they’d ever seen.
Work in a CPA office, amazing amount of paperwork….
we are in exactly the same boat! Except my husband and I each have our own different side businesses we work from home, plus his conventional job, and 4 different bank accounts.
I. FEEL. YOUR. PAIN.
Good news though, we close on the 15th of this month!!
Nowhere near as bad, but years ago hubby and I did a refi on our first home. When the time came to sign all the paperwork, guess who went on a month-long TDY and left me to sign everything with a power of attorney? So I got to sign this huge stack of documents by myself. Not so bad, right? Except I kept my maiden name and he goes by his middle name, so already our agent was at sea. Then when I actually had to sign, every page was MyFirstMiddleLast then MyFirstMiddleLastsigningforHisFirstMiddleLast…it took almost an hour and I felt like my hand was falling off! Plus I flubbed it on several pages because I wasn’t used to signing his last name or I put his middle as his first…it was just harder than it should have been.
Oooph this needed DocuSign (click here to sign). *weary head shake* I feel your pain, so much.
Yes indeed! Every house transaction since (sold three/bought three) has been a little easier, especially since DocuSign came into use. I keep telling hubby one of these times I’m going to the spa and he can get the power of attorney and deal with everything (but without the physical signatures it’s just not the same).
I had to do the same thing! My hubs left for the other coast to attend a family wedding, leaving me to sign our first mortgage with power of attorney.
All the paperwork when we were buying our 2nd house kept extending and went in to our family vacation time. Our mortgage company actually sent a notary public with the paperwork on the ferry from LA to Catalina Island for our final signing!
My only hassle is not having a middle name. A banker at some point decided there had to be something on *their* paperwork and assigned me an “A”. Whoever generated my mortgage paperwork found that on a single document and propagated it through the millions of forms, requiring me to line-thru and initial each one wherever my name appeared.
My husbands middle initial was X. We actually had bank people tell him if he didnt have a middle name he could just leave it blank. They had a really hard time understanding X WAS his initial, they thought he was just filling in the blank spot.
Fun times, buying a house….
I have a hyphenated last name. I usually only use half of it, and I have a long history of paperwork with only part of my name. When we went to sign our mortgage, my partner and I had to sign a paper with all the variations of our names. My partner had 3 names listed. I had an entire page of variations I had used at some point.
Our house has a finished basement, and we needed to do a radon test before we moved in. The seller’s realtor said we couldn’t do it beforehand (they were still remodeling and wouldn’t take the time off to let the property sit), so we added a clause that if any remediation was required, the seller would pay for all of it. The seller was obviously annoyed, and he asked why we didn’t do the test before closing. We got to listen to him chewing out his realtor for 15 minutes, for failure to pass on our testing request.
Two weeks after closing, we got a call from our mortgage broker. “Hey, is your partner a temp?” / “Yes, technically.” / “Oops we shouldn’t have approved you for a mortgage.” (Cue lots of scrambling during a holiday week to find more employment verification paperwork and figure out if we could liquidate enough assets to buy the house outright. Luckily that was not necessary, but it wasn’t a great Thanksgiving.)
Mine wasn’t that bad but as a single women they put me through the ringer! I remember it as an ordeal that ended in a hand cramp.
When we bought our house, we had a two inch stack of paperwork to sign. Our realtor sat with us for 45 minutes while we did it. I had to stop and rest to massage my hands because they were cramping.
And, apparently I didn’t do it quite right because on some signature pages I put my full middle name and some of them just my initial (because of the length of the signing line). Didn’t matter in the end, but the realtor had me worried for 48 hours that it would get bounced because of that.
The first time we bought something it was in 2000 and there wasn’t anywhere near the paperwork to sign. Times have changed.
First house I bought the loan company wouldn’t loan to me because, and this is a direct quote, “You are a single female.”
Single males were ok, just not females. This wasn’t 1950. It was 1999.
Oh, to add for a Monday funny. Had the dog out front on a long leash yesterday and the little escape artist slipped the leash and took off. She wouldn’t come back when I called, so I start yelling the 2 magic words guaranteed to make her stop and drop. “TUMMY RUB!” Yes, the neighbors thought I was insane, but she stopped, dro]ed and rolled over u til I got there to dispense the promised tummy rubs
I can’t even find a house to buy! My husband and I had to get pre-approved for THE FOURTH TIME.
Trying to get disabled ID for when you have MS. Tons of paperwork, tons of visits to doctors who don’t know you, who then form an opinion about the severity of your disability after 10 min of not listening to you. Tons of emails back and forth with the authority, who apparently have NO filesystem whatsoever and need everything sent again with every email.
Third try so far, no luck, even though I’m clearly “inconvenienced” by my chronic, invisible illness. (no energy, only able to work for 75 %, with using almost all my time off for sleeping, no feeling in my feet, etc etc etc).
That reminds me of the paperwork I had to do when my sister passed away from cancer 4 years ago. She had either 13 or 14 retirement accounts at 5 different companies. Plus she 2 cancer insurance polices and neither of them wanted the same information or the same format.
There is now a 7 1/2 inch stack of original copies of everything in my closet. It was paperwork hell for 6 months by the time I finished.
Both my Father and Step Father passed roughly 2 years ago, only a couple months apart from each other. The amount of paperwork we needed to go through, and the number of times we needed to go through it all… I had no idea before hand.
I’m refinancing right now. I almost had a heart attack when the bank came back and said “it looks like your spouse [name] is a vested party in your property. They’ll need to sign some paperwork too.”
Except the name they sent me wasn’t my spouse, it was the person who owned the house before me, 15 years ago. “What do you mean his name is still attached to my property?!?”
Some sort of magic voodoo fairy godmother must have been listening to my freak out because the reply was, “Never mind. His name’s not still on the property. It’s fine. I just read the paperwork wrong.”
Crazy, isn’t it?
My favorite story is when we tried to refinance our existing mortgage with a VERY LARGE national bank, and they had no means of electronically accepting all the information they requested from us. Files were too large to upload, bank doesn’t allow data on a stick or a cd, I didn’t have paper copies and wasn’t about to print out 100s of pages.
In the end we gave up.
I bought a condo last year as a single female. No problems whatever.
Refinanced a few months ago and I’m still chasing refinance closer for a copy of the notarized signing packet (mobile notary & online refi) and the title company for acknowledgement of the title transfer letter from the county.
Wishing you a speedy and accurate financing.
So in 1990 my ex and I were in the process of buying our first home. It was a foreclosure that was owned by a bank out of Pittsburg PA even though the house was located in Spring Tx, a burb of Houston. The bank had a first time home buyer program and everything was going great. The day we were supposed to close we were sitting at the title company signing the paperwork when a faxed cease and desist letter came through. The bank had gone into receivership and been taken over by the government. We had paid several thousand dollars in earnest money to the bank already and nobody could tell us anything. Several weeks later and dozens of phone calls we found out the house had been transferred to the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), the government entity that had been formed to deal with all of the assets from the banks that went belly up at that time. Dozens of more phone calls later I found out that it was with the RTC office in Harrisburg PA because the bank had been in Pittsburg. Dozens MORE phone calls followed trying to get them to understand that the house was in Texas and not Pennsylvania. Finally about six weeks later I found someone that could work with me on it. We had to resubmit all of our paperwork plus dozens of new forms, had to prove our offer on the house was appropriate for the market, had to prove that we had already paid the bank money and had to prove we were first time buyers. That took another six to eight weeks of faxing and FedExing documents. Then came all of the requests for additional documents which took a couple of more months. what made things more complicated was we had just gotten married about 2 months before we had originally tried to close on the house with the bank and they were fine with it but RTC had a problem with it even though we had been together for four years before marrying and had records of joint finances for three years. The representative from RTC even asked us if we could mow the grass and check on the property because they didn’t have anyone contracted in Texas to do so and they would give us credit for the work towards our eventual closing. After about five months of back and forth we got a package from RTC with the house keys in it and a certified letter stating we could live in the house rent free for upkeep and maintenance while our application was being processed. That was a very good thing because it took eighteen months almost to the day from our first closing before we were able to close with RTC. In the end it was way better for us because instead of the 10% down the bank had required RTC only wanted $500 down, they paid 15% of the sale price in repairs/renovations to the property, and covered all but $250 of the closing costs. They took the $750 out of the earnest money we had paid the bank and refunded us the rest. We lived in the house for free for almost a year. It was crazy and stressful and all before email and the internet were really used so that made it even worse but in the end we came out on top.
That is totally insane. Coming out on top in the end was a real win.
We’ve bought 3 houses now. Our first 2 were historic homes in Upstate New York in the past 3-5 years. Easy peasy, no problems. Our most recent? New build. In California. In the midst of a career change. During a cross country move. At the height of a pandemic.
SO MUCH DOCUMENTATION. And we had to do it twice, because something was wrong with/missing from the paperwork the first time around causing our disqualification. If I don’t have to think about buying another home in the next decade, it’ll still be too soon. Nightmare.
Do you know when you move to the US as an adult, you have no credit history, no one will let you get a mortgage. Not even through my husband, who has been working for the same multinational bank for over a decade. Apparently you can even view houses, because you have no credit, so no one will give you a pre-approval letter.
Thank god we moved to the boonies and the houses are cheap enough we had enough money to buy our house out right. We had to show our bank statements to prove we had enough money to buy the houses without a mortgage to get appts to view the houses. If we were transferred to a major city, we would be so screwed.
May I present to you a short film you will greatly enjoy, (less than 4 minutes) 036: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXWZ3uAEKsw This video came out while I was living in Spain and it was widely circulated by the expat community all over social media when it first came out. It is a parody of the extreme red tape when it comes to anything administrative related and if you’ve lived in Spain you know what I’m talking about LOL.
It is in Spanish with English subtitles. It is one of the best short films I’ve ever seen, the acting is brilliant, and just the amount of paperwork the government employee starts demanding of the woman because he wants to see her fail is just ridiculous. It’s kind of filmed like a Wild West showdown, with the perfect tumbleweed of paper rolling at the end. Enjoy!
Funny!!! Thanks for sharing.
🙀
I told them where I worked and, as they were already my bank, they basically just had to verify that I was still employed. And have e someone out to look at the house.
Of course, that was 20 years ago, in Upstate NY.
We are in the process of selling our current home to my daughter and her fella, and we’re buying property that my in-laws own. To say that it’s been a struggle being caught in the middle is the understatement of the year. The daughter’s fella works out of town, sometimes for a couple of months at a stretch, and works LOOOONNNNGGGG hours. By the time he’s done for the day, business hours are closed, and most people are sleeping. He’s struggling trying to get the last two documents in, and the closings, including my in-laws on their new place, are the 29th of this month. I am freaking out. My sleep sucks right now, because all I can thing about is packing and loan documents. My rational self knows that everything is going to be fine, but the crazy crack-head that lives in a tiny little cell in my medualla oblongata is ruling every thought. Cheese and rice, I just eant this to be over.
Self employed family as well. I feel your home buying pain.
I browsed a number of comments, not not all. Please forgive me if this has already been said:
I knew Ilona and I knew Gordon. Did you intend to give us that third name?
😐
I wondered that as well.
I could totally see her trolling us with a fake, but I live in the “better safe than sore” camp!
Several years ago my husband and I wanted to refinance our mortgage. We went to our bank and gave them the paperwork. Except my income is from K-1’s…. OK so what does this mean, it means after 4 months or back and forth we just paid off our mortgage and no longer did business with that bank.
My biggest paperwork PITA experience had to do with changing my name. I married in 2001 and changed my name to my husband’s. The whole process was annoying: new driver’s license, new social security card (requiring you to go to the Social Security office), amended passport, etc. The really annoying part, though, was that every vendor I dealt with (bank, credit card companies, magazine subscriptions, insurance, etc.) seemed to have a different process and different requirements. It took nearly a full year to get it all straightened out across the board, sometimes with repeat calls (or in-person visits) to certain vendors.
When I divorced in 2004, I was still so haunted by the misery of the name-change experience that I just kept my ex-husband’s name, and I still have it. Not going through that paperwork hassle again!!
Our son bought a house through a mortgage loan company, you know, one of the companies that just can’t wait to give you the money. He had a list from the realtor and the mortgage company of all papers needed. Since his personal filing is boxes on the floor it was interesting,it took a hours upon hours upon days to get it all, but he got them. Luckily he numbered each page and kept a copy. He sent the whole file. No fewer than five times he was notified that something that he had already mailed was missing.He’d have them check for the pages. The fourth time they claimed they never got any of the entire file although on the previous 3 calls they had the file. It was agonizing. He has bought several houses since then,but not with that company.
And here I am-anoyed, because of the papers I need to get a new CreditCard 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I don’r envy you….
TSCHAKKA!
You can do this! 💪💪💪🌻
If the documentation isn’t bad enough getting digitized can be a nightmare. I refinanced during the pandemic and everything was via the web. I’m pretty good with scanning and sending various formats but I no longer have high speed internet at home. Cut those guys out of my life when they ticked me off. So all my documents were brought to work for scanning and uploading. Was going great till the w2 form went missing after scanning. All my personal information out there where anyone in the office could look. I sweated that out till the IS guy scrubbed all the folders and assured me the document was no where to be found. I aged 10 years in 2 hours when that happened.
I am a lawyer who does real estate. When I have my clients meet with me to sign documents, they all wonder why so many pages. Your situation is why. After you have done all your work, we have to do ours and it is frustrating every time.
Too many stories to continue but let’s make is simple: I have thick hair but the longer I practise real estate law, the thinner my hair gets from my pulling at it all the time!
Also, I HATE banks that still insist on faxing 65 pages. Arghghgh!!!
We put an above asking price bid on a foreclosure (yeah, Californian here during a “low” point when our housing bubble “burst”).. Our first house so we used a realtor. Little that we knew, the owner was really owners, nine (9!) of them had gone into property ownership. So 9+ copies of paperwork everyone. Our wonderful realtor would repeated murmur her mantra “learning experience, it is a learning experience..” as she nursed the paper cuts on her fingers while our hands cramped writing our signatures for all the documents. I swear, the title manager also had a sad day..
No good story to tell — we are ‘conventionally employed’ — just a thanks for my gut laugh upon seeing your list of docs.
I feel your pain! My husband is a business owner and doesn’t currently receive income via the business (it’s a start up) and trying to say “he works, but has no income, it’s just mine”. SUCH a pain.
We bought a new house in 2007 during the crash. We used a bank being bought out because it failed ( not when we started, but at the end). We had 5 loan officers in the 3 months. The last one threatened to cancel our loan agreement because we had not filed all of our paper work. We had filed ALL OF IT FOUR TIMES! I asked for the loan manager. I read back to him the dates and times of submissions of each of the 4 submittal. I read back to him the names, the dates and times of conversation with each and every person I had talked to over the 3 months and a synopsis of each conversation. I asked him where to fax all 40 plus pages of submittal with proof of receipt if same.
Then I asked who their legal contact was because I would have my lawyer contact them and start proceedings. Their ineptitude was not worth losing my very low home loan interest rates. I also mentioned that I was so upset by the lack of care in thier employees toward me their customer, I would work 2 jobs to pay for the lawyer, and bankrupt the family of I had to. I then asked for the VP in charge of loans and repeated my self.
The loan finally processed and closed 6 days later. The manager called me daily.
I never said any 4 letter words and I never called names. I just stated the facts.
Years later, the minute the house was paid off we closed all accounts and moved out the money.
You win!
🎤🎤🎤(mic drop)
WOW! Just wow!
Wow amazing and you write the books that I love too
Most of our paperwork nightmares have come via the internet. I am surprised the computer is still intact between frustration and anger.
I feel your pain!
Buying an older mobile home – hahahaha, only certain types of banks will make these loans and even they don’t want to if the unit is old. I had paper and notes on the backs of envelopes for the next step – asap hoops to jump– and more current paystubs (because we kept timing out) collecting over two months of merry hell.
RENTING and apartment in an area that had a third of its housing wiped out by fire (seriously that rental document was almost a foot thick. I kept finding mistakes that they then had to correct and reprint, sacrificing a small grove of trees on the altar of typos).
Registering my kids for Kindergarten. Honestly, it seemed worse than applying for college.
Drumroll for the biggest, baddest PITA paperwoes:
IEPs – Individualized Education Plans. Especially when you bring in lawyers because there is Trouble right here in Education City. I have almost a small closet full of this paperwork in filing boxes and I am scared to get rid of them because in another year or two, we are back to the lawyers and having all that paperwork saves the day. They have moved with us when we moved… twice.
I’m not going to buy a house till either my daughter wins the lottery or I win Publishers Clearing House. We have been occasionally talking this over for years, and we are agreed that it MUST have a mother-in-law apartment.
I am entirely willing to share a mortgage with my firstborn, but I WILL NOT share a kitchen. Our tastes are quite different, and she is far too bossy.
Whenever it happens, I’m sure the paperwork will be interesting.
Well, eight years ago when my wife and I purchased our home we discovered a major issue at one of the credit bureaus here in the US. Someone entered a 10 digit number (old work phone number from a job more than a decade ago) into a 9 digit field (SSN) and thus the credit bureaus was reporting that my wife had two different social security numbers. This delayed the closing and took six weeks of researching plus paperwork with SSA to correct. What fun. I still don’t understand how you put a 10 digit number into a computer database field that only accepts nine digit numbers
30 or 40 years ago when I went to work for Navy I joined Navy Federal credit union as a vet still with the Reserves and as a civilian, and stayed with them ever since. So despite retirement and divorce they had continuous records with me. So despite minimal or no child support payments (long story and extenuating circumstances) the credit union was with me when I refinanced and then when I kind of sold to my ex and bought another. So, despite tough times my NFCU was there for me and I thought I’d tell this happy story instead of a nightmare.
So not a bad paperwork story on my end, but probably a banks worst nightmare…back in the day when you could assume a previous owners loan (yep, the 70’s) my husband and I bought a house. It was a great deal, had a $97 a month house payment and a huge (for us) assumption payment. Well we took my college fund (did I mention I was 19?) and bought the house from the owner. No bank approval, just us in an attorney’s office signing papers. They told us we’d need to have the note put into our name. Ok, no problem. I go to the bank on a day I’m off of school in my jeans, poncho, and boots (definitely the 70s!) and tell the bank person I’m there to put the note in my husband and my name. They looked at me in shock, and not a little horror, and said “but you have to be APPROVED”!!! I said, because I’m totally clueless as to what that entails, “so approve us. We own the house.” They asked what we’d put down, which was substantial, and where my husband and I worked. They LOVED that I was a college student, and my age, but my ex worked as an engineer in the main employer of the town. Since the $97 was definitely within his salary range, they approved it and transferred the loan. It wasn’t until years later I realized that’s not how it’s done. 😜🤣
Yep. Bought our first home last year. I’ve been self-employed for 10 years and they needed a laundry list of documents.
We closed and moved in September/October 2020 during one of the COVID-19 peaks. It was the worst closing I have ever endured. I have stock holdings and was planning on selling some of my stock for the downpayment. The bank refused to allow it. I’m like “WHAT?” Finally they agreed but insisted I give them paperwork on every portion of the sale. It was crazy. I gave them my W-2s at least 5 times, what? Do you not believe them the first time I gave them to you. I had to give them almost a years worth of Merrill Lynch statements plus almost as many of my 403b. This is through the credit union I’ve banked with for over 30 years. But the craziest thing is they wanted a “letter of intent” so I asked the person who was buying my old house for a letter of intent to buy my house. They asked 5 times, and I submitted this 5 times before they told me that I have to write the letter of intent. Couldn’t you have just ****ing told me that when you originally asked for it and I asked you what it was. Grrrrrrrrrrr, it still gives me heart burn 🔥.
Lol, self employed antique dealer.
Single(makes it worse)
Getting old( they won’t say it, but makes it worse)
Own everything with no payments ( makes it worse)
And (gasp, Horror!) hand write and file my taxes myself.
Was turned down for a $10,000 SECURED loan on a cargo van I had paid HALF down on by PNC bank. But they were fine the next week on giving me a PNC business credit card. Needless to say I Changed Banks.
I live and work in Korea, and there is nothing they like more than paperwork. Every minutiae must be documented, ad signed by everyone. Want to get paid? You must do a payment request. Every. Damn. Month. Quit you job? I just did. It took me an entire day to do all the paperwork. And the evaluations. Self-evaluations, statements of previous duties (last year) and new duties (this year).
And now on to Grad School applications. I’m 33, why do they need my parent’s full biographical information. Such nonsense.
When I was a first time home buyer a few years ago when the market was starting to heat up but wasn’t as intense as it was now, I applied for pre approval for a home loan. At the time I was conventionally employed for around seven years with the same employer, applying for a loan well within my means. I had 20% down and change. I also had no debt, everything paid off. Had rented same place also for five years so could show ability to meet monthly payments. Excellent credit score that was also well established. All the docs needed accounted for. And I was told as a 30 year old individual that I needed my parents to co-sign because I was a risk. I found several other banks who were happy to work with me no problem but it still makes me seethe to this day. I feel like the real estate market is so stacked against single home buyers.
I’ve been in the lian industry for over 30 years. I started with the complicated municipal development revenue bonds. – basically a commercial loan with municipal development because it will increase employment, better the economy and is cheaper for the company. Loan documents are bound into books for which could hold between 500 to 750 pages for each party – sometimes part one and two. Worst closing was on a straight municipal bond, the county was buying new fire trucks when I got a phone call just before the formal closing the next day that the county treasurer had cleaned out the account and run. Warrant was out for his arrest. He had certified all the information, had signed every document, etc. It delayed the closing by over 2 months. He had to be caught, the money returned, new treasurer elected and all of the loan documents had to be redone and the multiple location rescheduled. I ended up in compliance for a residential lender, translating new laws c and regulations into English from the legalease. I hate paperwork.
Long story short, my husband had to renew his veterinary license as it expired Dec 31st, 2020. The secretary of state’s office decided that if you intended to prescibe prescription medications (which wouldn’t most doctors???) you had to fill out a new intent to dispute paperwork. Because it required an actual human to look at it, the secretary of state’s office didn’t renew the license until 8 weeks after it was expired (legally you could practice as long as renewal was pending). Because we had to wait on his personal license to be renewed by the secretary of state, we were late in renewing our buisness license which required the personal license information. Since we were “late” the secretary of state’s office charge us a late fee on our business renewal.
My husband has tragically bad handwriting. When we were moving back to the US he got here first and filled out the paperwork for enrolling kids ins school, insurance, stacks of forms for the Autism waiver, and a bajillion other things we had to set up. We ended up having a problem with the schools bc they said the kids’ socials were fake, turns out they could read husband’s writing. A few months later it was an insurance and banking problem because of husband’s writing. When we moved to current state I had to fill out everything, it took about a week. He was only allowed to help if it could be answered with a check mark.
My husband and I were trying to buy a house and get a prequalification letter. I am self-employed with a strong income history. 15 months prior I had taken a regular full time job for 3 months, decided it wasn’t for to me, and gone back to my previous gig. The loan company came back to me saying our debt to income ratio wasn’t acceptable. And they wanted us to pay off a small debt. When I asked for more explanation it turned out that they weren’t counting the 3 months of income from when I had the full time job because I didn’t still have the job. I told them I would just reduce the amount of the loan and suddenly the prequal letter was in my inbox and the agent was very confident he could get the underwriter to understand our situation. It’s such a frustrating and ridiculous process!
Our closing on our first house was delayed because they misspelled my husband’s name on EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF PAPER.
His name is Brian. They put BRAIN.
I tried to get them to leave it, but no.
This is probably going to tick you off, but many Banks keep asking for extra shit until you say “No”. You basically “really want” the house and in some cases they just keep asking for more because it helps them out and they will then take that information and surprise use it to sell you shit. Example, depending upon the size of your PFS (personal financial statement) you may get very tailored solicitations/offers. Take care, also Bankers have a special ring in hell for a reason.
Paperwork hell, when I was young went with my mom to renew her military id, this was in the early 80’s if no late 70’s. There were probably 5-7 forms to fill out, they still used the carbon paper, that never copied to all 3-5 layers so you filled out the top sheet and checked each consecutive sheet filling out what didn’t copy clearly. If an error was made you started over with the carbon copy form. At the time the line to sign your name was maybe 2 inches. You were required to fill out your full name legibly on said 2 inch line. My mom’s full name First; Middle; and Last ended up being well over 40 characters.
1st was filled out in both blue and black ink which was a no-no
2nd set the signature was too small to see. No-no
3rd signaturetook more then the 2 inches. No-no
4th an error accured by the officer verifying paperwork start over.
5th after talking to a more experience higher ranked officer they permitted my mom to use initials so her name would fit on the allowed 2 inches.
Then we had to do my renewl paperwork.
Years ago a university friend badly needed a break and was going to fly out for a little visit. The finances for this depended on her tax refund. The day it was due to arrive I phoned to see if it had come.
“well yeah…”
“what’s up, you sound weird?”
“it came addressed to the executor in charge of the estate of the dead me.”
Luckily live her was able to deposit it.
Thanks, tax folks!
What?! Another omg moment.
Filling out an SF (standard form) document is hair pulling, frustrating, screaming, and very painful experience. An SF form is any type of federal form. Even the instructions that come with any form can be hard to understand. I filled out a 8 page document, 6 of those pages were instructions on how to fill out the form. Fortunately I also had an email from the sender of the form with additional instructions. Then I had 7 more different forms to fill out. It took me two days.
Omg! I figured it would be bad, but this is horrendous.
We were going to help our daughter with her mortgage-we had paid ours down to nothing so we thought it would be no big deal. We had had a mortgage that we had paid off 20 years ago. Only problem the bank hadn’t cleared their records. Their policy said they didn’t have to look at it for up to 3 weeks even though it was their fault. Cost us an extra $3000 from the seller. When our daughter bought the house from us they did not go through that bank.
Omg, buying my first house was a nightmare. I had closed an investment account and paid off a car loan and they needed proof and my god, that was like pulling teeth. My sister graduated with her doctorate in PT and they required her graduation certificate as proof as to why she wasn’t working for an extended period of time. Buying a house should not be as stressful as it is.
It’s obscene. Been there done that and have huge file folder on my hard drive labeled mortgage sshhhh (well it’s something else), as well as nightmares.
Also we found out the hard way that you need to find someone who is familiar with self employed, otherwise you get denied.
Bloody hell! I’d no idea anyone would ever need that much documentation. But at least you only need to print it? Nothing more to say than that, really because I know you & Gordon have it in hand.
Well, I work for a pharmaceutical company. Sometimes feels like we can’t even blink without documenting it.
I volunteer in a Canadian branch of a 401(c) non-profit registered out of California. We had a service that we charged 8$USD for to cover the costs. Our Canadian clients usually ended up paying 20CAD or more for this, due to the need for a money order in US funds (average cost 7.50), the exchange rate and extra postage for international mail. Deciding this was unfair, we attempted to open a canadian bank account. It took 2 years, 5 banks, 3 provinces, 37 faxes, over 100 emails, and about 2 dozen in-person visits.
It’s been open now for about 6 years, and due to the transient nature of volunteer workers, only one of the four signatories on the account is correct. To change the signatories the bank wants all four current plus any new to appear in person at the same time. Given that one signatory is in Montreal and one is in St-John’s (29 hour drive), one has moved to the US and one has fallen off the face of the earth, the odds of that happening are slim to none.
We recently refi-ed to pay off our cars and take some money to upgrade the house. My husband and I are both retired and belong to a credit union, for over thirty years. They know our money history and see first-hand how our credit history is. Due to Covid pandemic procedures, someone from the Credit Union actually came to our house to notarize all our paperwork. We did our original loan with the same Credit Union also, so there was five years of payment history. Our house had appreciated $200k in the interim and we had less than $300k balance, so there was a lot of equity involved. I can’t say enough about credit unions. Develop a relationship with the best credit union in your area, that can make all the difference when it comes time to buy a car, take out some equity, refi or buy a new house. Doing business with an organization that knows your name when you walk through the door is priceless.
Hate Bank of America banks, the credit card and service for that is decent, not the banks though.
Love my credit union and will always bank with a credit union.
Ouch!! what an obscene amount of documentation. I totally sympathize 🙁
My Monday was made much brighter by starting a re-read of Innkeeper…
On the paperwork front though, those of us who are citizens of African countries have to go through an onerous (and expensive) application and interview process to get holiday visas to visit most “first-world” countries. (We are obviously high-risk at turning into “illegals”!!)
When I wished to visit close family in the UK some years back, I had to spend days getting paperwork together and visiting the Visa office to get a single entry, once-off, visa.
This process was exponentially worse due to being self-employed. A single letter from an employer plus bank statements would have sufficed to show financial independence and incentive to return home.
However, being self-employed, close to retirement and having my assets, such as they are, spread quite widely, I ended up submitting an inch thick pile of original statements, title deeds, certificates etc. to the Visa office. All to show that I had more incentive to return home than to stay illegally in the UK.
In this day and age of everything being electronic/on-line/in the cloud – I am sure you can empathise with the pain of getting things printed or mailed to me so I could submit the required, original hard-copies!!!
I really hope that the rest of your house purchasing process goes as smoothly and as rapidly as could be.
I’m an administrative assistant for a healthcare network. I do the accounts payable/invoicing for 13 different offices, and I help around 120 providers with credentialing, licensure, ect. I’m also a History student… I have paperwork coming out of my ears. xD
Just wait until closing and you need to sign everything.
My hubby and I both sold houses, cashed CDs and added personal savings to buy a new home with cash. Having to show provenance for all your cash money was pretty annoying. You can’t just dump it all in one account and then produce a cashier’s check.
Another time we sold a property to a family that had financing from a refugee relocation fund sponsored by the UN. How that deal ever went through was (and still is) a complete mystery to me.
On January 7th, I decided to build a house in a local subdivision. This is week one paperwork, way before electrical visit ( where you want EVERY plug, light, and fixture etc) and then the design visit where you decide everything including if you want a 3” baseboard or a 5” baseboard and the cost of each… this visit alone added almost $20k to my home price😱. It’s now April 6th and I’m still wondering when they will break ground…
Wells Fargo. Ugh. We ran our original mortgage through them and what a pain. Just double check every freaking line of the documents. They are not great at details. Well at least ours wasn’t. Best of luck and CONGRATS on finding something! Yayayay!!
i was hired as the sole bookkeeper for a company last June (but only for 20 hours per week) whose books had not been balanced/reconciled since 2013……..it took me since then….and i am now caught up through the end of 2020. Wanna see MY stack of paperwork?????
I feel your pain. I am a Accountant/CPA for a company and do taxes on the side.
My husband and father in law have the exact same name. Exact. No JR or SR or 2nd. It’s made house buying and refinancing interesting. We all own a property together too. 😅
Perfect way to start a Monday reply, on Tuesday! Our refi was a paper/ required documents nightmare. We started the process last March (just before close down). We had a closing date at the end of May… then June…then July (you see how this went). Every time there was a delay (due to the mortgage co.) we had to send in updated paystubs, banking documents, extension paperwork, etc. Finally at the end of October we closed and still needed to bring other docs with us, not to mention the billion gazillion (exact #) of phone calls to check on progress, status, clarifications and whatnots. Ugghhhh
A couple years ago I refi’ed from a 30 year to a 15 year with my own mortgage company, with whom I have a spotless pay history. I didn’t take out any equity, just changed the load terms and lowered the interest rate. Did that make it easier? Nope. I’m self employed as a third party logistics coordinator for the long haul trucking industry. So, not only did I have to supply most of the docs that you listed, I also had to write a statement for my file, explaining what my job actually is and why my income can go up and down due to seasonal changes in the trucking industry. So with all the hassles involved being self employed, at least you didn’t have the mortgage company say “what’s a writer do?” LOL. Hopefully the most painful parts are over soon.
I do taxes on the side, and the amount of paperwork people bring me is amazing. Even after Trumps tax reforms, which took away the majority of taxpayers’ need to itemize, they still put EVERYTHING into a large envelope and bring it to me.
I am also the controller for a large legal firm. The paperwork needed to give to the tax preparer’s is unbelievable. However, not nearly as much as when I worked in pubic accounting and worked on company audits. There were boxes upon boxes of paperwork delivered for us to go through, sort and reconcile.
Biggest paper users – Bankers, Lawyers and CPAs/Accountants. I think book writers might be up there too, but don’t know personnaly 🙂
As a small business owner (read: She Who Busts Butt & Wrangles Freelancers), I completely understand! Went through the same thing a couple of years ago. It got so into the weeds at one point that I started taking pictures of all my incoming receivables and sending them to the mortgage peeps unasked. What struck me as particularly funny was the thought that yes, I could have a conventional job — say, office manager for Acme Anvil Co. – to provide my bona fides. But the mortgage company has absolutely NO idea if Acme is a sound institution or headed for bankruptcy and getting ready to fire all its employees! Oy.
Oh, and that’s just the first list. Wait until underwriting decides they want some other imaginary document that they just made up. SO SORRY.
One time when refinancing our mortgage I almost signed a paper canceling the whole deal, during the closing 🤦🏻♀️. In my defense it was during the sign this but initial here part of the process and I saw a blank and started to sign but was caught in time.
This year we refinanced our home and rental to lower rates and it was the easiest time ever! We did it online and did half the signing electronically, then we set up a table in our driveway for the rest keeping socially distant. Over in about 15 minutes.
Good Luck!
My sister owns, free and clear, a large house north of Chicago worth around $300,000, and is looking to buy a house in Louisiana to retire to – in the $180,000 range. Because she had a high-paying job as a research biochemist (now retired), and by being a beneficiary to two family members who also left her beaucoup bucks, she could literally pay cash for the house. But she didn’t want to cash out any of her savings, so she decided to get a mortgage just until her house sold, and pay off the mortgage.
She can’t.
She has very little “income” because she is retired, even though she has a large net worth. But they don’t care – no matter how much paperwork she supplied, proving she was good for it, she couldn’t tick off their little boxes which didn’t make any sense!
Go figure.
My husbands parents discovered that their first house (rented out for 15 years) they wanted to sell- was not theirs. They owned the neighbors house and lot and vice versa. The books were filed with the wrong lot numbers. They needed a few years to sort it out officially.
Time was, if you were making over $10k/yr it became advantageous to incorporate for tax reasons. A good friend of mine did this some years ago so that she would not suffer the stigma of being self-employed while purchasing and selling houses and other property. She gets nothing but respect from the people she deals with as CEO of a well-to-do tech firm which netted her nothing but suspicion and disrespect as a well-to-do single mother and sole owner proprietor of a thriving business. (Also there are certain other legal structures that are useful for the purpose of asset protection that are useful to know about and use.)
Look into it; perhaps your dealings with these annoying entities can be made a whole lot easier 🙂
Hope this helps!
We’ve had our share of mortgage shenanigans, but with our current house, we had gone through a mortgage broker we had used before. No problem until she handed off the paperwork to underwriter. have conversation by phone with underwriter about our status, and tell her when we plan on closing because the sellers were moving halfway across the country that day. She tells me “everything looks good!”, we’ll be ready to close. two weeks out from closing, I call the underwriter, reminding her that we had a firm closing date, and had been told we only needed to know how much our cashier’s check for the closing should be. I ask her how much that would be, and she says “oh, right, I guess I should go through your paperwork.”
“Looks good” meant “makes a pretty pile on my desk”
then they had questions about our cash in bank – we had sold some of our horses, and they wanted proof we could get that much money for them, to prove we weren’t laundering drug money for a mortgage and who knows what all.
many conversations later, we’re in real estate office signing papers, as sellers pull out in rented moving truck, at 5:30, and our real estate agent turns around and says “well, I really didn’t think you would get that done, congratulations on your new house.”
It’s not a REAL closing unless someone has been threatened with a near-death experience at the hands of the buyer.
My paperwork story is not that complicated, but was rather a massive pain in the ass.
Due to mishap on the hospital’s part (they ignored my mom basically), I was issued two birth certificates with two different names. The first has my correct name, but the second was one is the considered my “real” birth certificate. We didn’t learn this until I was 16 and applying for a driver’s license. ALL of my information, including my social security card, is in my correct name, but since only my second birth certificate is considered “legal,” I learn that the government cannot confirm my existence.
There’s a very easy fix for this apparently, I just have to have a legal name change…. which among other things, requires two government issued documents with the same name. At this time I have two government issued documents, but the names don’t match. O.o It took me weeks to find someone official who would sign the documents that just allowed me to go before the judge to request a legal name change without the proper matching identification. The person I found went through something similar and agreed to sign even though I didn’t have both documents matching. Thank god for that!
… Then I moved states and found out there was more I had to do and that took even more hoop jumping.
Oh. My. Goodness. That is obscene. And the worst part is they probably won’t look at half of it, they’ve requested it ‘just in case’?
I spent my Monday saving 4 1/2 years of payslips to PDF files. We were paid weekly.
And underpaid, hence the scanning of payslips so they can be sent to the lawyers for the class action law suit.
I haven’t been able to work up the motivation to scan all the hard copy contracts etc. yet.
OOF! So. Much. Paperwork!
The first house we bought was an adventure in a few ways. My husband worked on tug boats on the Alaska river system. This was seasonal work. He’d leave in March, get back in October/Novemberish. When we went to buy the house in spring, we ran into the tripping hazard of his lack of income for the last four months. I didn’t have a job in the area yet either. So he had to get back out on the tugs and *I* discovered the joys of home buying on top of power of attorney stuff and getting paperwork and stuff looked at with three thousand miles, three timezones, and limited communication options. Made buying the next house, with only 500 miles (but no timezone switch and working phones) a breeze in comparison
Poor Mod R having to read all these horror stories – must be seizing up in a corner somewhere!
Yup. I work in staffing with both W2 candidates and contractors. We’ve had a few contractors try to switch to W2 when trying to refinance their homes so they can get a pay stub, and we have to let them know it can’t work that way.