Getting a Loan

We applied for a loan today. Last week I solicited a small mountain of Good Faith Estimates, which are a lending organization's guess at how much they are going to charge you at closing to get your mortgage money. They varied wildly between 2 and 5 thousand dollars. Except that when you read a little closer, the lower estimates were leaving off important items like insurance premiums that have to be paid. Which gave me no faith whatsoever in their estimate overall. We found two estimates we were generally happy with and I called to make an appointment to apply for a loan. I got an appointment and was faxed a list of documents and a loan application. The mortgage officer double-booked the appointment and actually asked if we could come back later. Absolutely not. So we got a last-minute appointment with another mortgage officer at the bank. Since we went with this bank on a friend's advice and we were now chatting with the woman he had worked with, this was actually cool. So it was time to get down to the loan app.

The faxed app had a list of documents to bring. Including divorce decrees, recent IRA statements, school transcript, etc. I thought it seemed a little excessive. It turns out it was. That list is for FHA loans, not conventional ones. For a conventional loan, all you need is a paystub and some W-2's. Humph. My thorough reading of "the list" did earn me one small point. When the mortgage officer asked for a copy of the contract I replied "That's not on the list." She replied that they really needed to fix the list. After calculating the resell value of my cars on Kelly Blue Book and totalling Scott's 401k only to find out it didn't matter, I completely agreed.