After a frantic rush to get all the paperwork to Chase as soon as possible, we now had to wait around for the appraiser to come look at the house.  We also got an official good faith estimate, which I was shocked to notice had a $2,000 transfer tax on it.  Tyson blamed this on the computer, and said it wouldn’t be on the finally settlement.  We got the last of the paper work to Chase on March, 19th, and the appraiser came by about a week later on the 27th.  He seemed nice enough and I went over all the improvements that we’d made to the house, and how much it had all cost and what not.  He looked around, and although he seemed impressed by the inside of the house, I could tell he thought the outside looked a little shabby.  (Not so anymore with its shiny new paint job!).  A week later I send an e-mail to Tyson asking when we would get a date for our closing.  He responded “soon”.

At the same time I sent out disputes to the two credit agencies that had the mysteriours $89  collection on my credit reports.    Both Experian and Transunion make it very easy to dispute false items, which I suppose is necessary since it seems so easy to get false items on the reports to begin with.  The Transunion response was very speedy, and they had removed the item after just a few days.  Experian took a bit longer but by the end of April they too had removed the mystery item.  I never heard any more from either one of them about what it was, or how it had gotten on there in the first place.

Throughout April we kept getting questions from our Loan processor Shirley Metatla regarding the ‘purchase’ by Jess of our house.  It seemed that their underwriting department was vastly confused by this and was unable to handle it, despite what Tyson said.  Shirley also told us that we would apparently need a lawyer for all of this, despite not even having one when we bought the house in the first place.   So in  May with my credit report cleaned up  I decided to see if we could get it switched back to a regular refinance with both Jess and I on the title.  Tyson seemed skeptical that my credit score would have improved enough to qualify, but he re-ran it anyway, and low and behold it was now over 800.  He set it up to now be a refinance, and we scrambled to send him another giant pile of paperwork right away.

About a month later I still hadn’t heard anythign more from them, despite sending an e-mail or two to Shirley.  At this point was quite fed up with the general ineptitude, as well as the extremely poor communication from Chase.    Jess finally called Shirley on June 17th, and left a message, (neither Shirley or Tyson ever actually anwsered the phone, we always had to leave messages and hope for a call back) a few days later Shirley called back and said that our file had just gone to underwriting, and that they were averaging a 3-week turn around.  So after waiting 3 months already we now had another month or so before it would be approved.

Coming in Part 3, we do actually close!