Last night we spent an hour finally closing on our new mortgage.  Our previous mortgage had been done through a broker, and was promptly sold to Dovenmuehle mortgage, who in general we’ve been quite happy with.  However with our rate at 5.625%  when rates dropped to the 4.75% range I thought we should look into refinancing.  In the beginning of March after looking around a lot, both online and making some phone calls  it seemed the best rate we could get would come from Chase (technically JP Morgan Chase).  Jess knew someone who had already started a refi with them and seem pretty happy with who he dealt with, so I gave Tyson Coon a call and started the process.   Tyson seemed very on the ball, and very responsive via e-mail.  He would generally respond in a few minutes and always on the same day.   He implied thought that everything had to be done right away as things could change quickly.  After discussing our options we decided to go with a 25-year loan @ 4.625% with 1.375 points.

We started doing the pre-qualification process and that was when the first problem arose.  Despite what I thought was a perfect credit history,  my credit score was around 700, not high enough to qualify for the rate we were quoted.  It seems that since I last checked my credit report, about a year ago, some collection agency (Interstate Credit & Coll), I’d never heard of in a town I’d never been to had filed a $89 charge against me.  Apparently they are the worst collection agency in the world, as I’d never even received a letter or a phone call about it, but there it was wrecking my credit score.   Despite my wife’s ~800 score, they apparently just take the worst one, and go off that.

Since the house was in only mine name orignaly Tyson said that instead of doing a refinance we could instead have her do a purchase, where I basicly gave the house to her, and then she would qualify for the new rate.  My name wouldn’t be on the title anymore, but that didn’t really matter to me.  So I went out and ran around to get the paperwork to transfer it to her, as Tyson said it needed to be done right away.   After a harried bit of faxing, scanning and e-mailing, we got everything squared away and just had to wait for the appriaser to come and then we would find out when our closing was, or so we thought.