Last we had heard, our refinance had been submitted to underwriting on June 17th.  At that time we were told there was a 3-week turn aroun, and so when July 8th came along and of course we hadn’t heard a peep, I fired off another e-mail to our “Loan Processor” Shirley.   Suprise, suprise, not only was it not done, but it would still be another two weeks before it was finished.  Finally on July 20th we got an e-mail saying that it had been approved!  Yay! Ohh but wait, no they still need a monthly statement from our savings account.   So after yet more scrambling I send that in,  and it goes back to underwriting.  At that time I also ask for a breakdown of what we need to pay at closing.

Another week goes by and I get another e-mail asking for another form to be signed, this one authorizing Chase to talk to our old mortgage company.  After yet another week goes by we once again hear that our loan has been approved by underwriting  (apparently it took them two weeks to review my bank statement).   Of course  the e-mail gives the loan at 4.625% with 2.5 points for 30 years.  Completely different than the 4.625% with 1.375 pts, at 25 years.  I fire of f a few angry e-mails, and Tyson steps in and says that he will “take care” of the points.   I also again ask for a breakdown of the $12,000 they need us to bring to closing.  We schedule the closing for three days later, on Monday the 10th.

That night, Jess looks at it and notices that it has the wrong term (which in my furor over the points I overlooked).   She calls Shirley, and sends off another e-mail complaining about it, and once again asked for a breakdown of the closing costs.  Shirley says she’ll get it switched over and that the closing would still be on for 4:30pm on Monday.  Still no information about what would happen at closing, who to call if something was wrong, what we needed to have, nothing.

Monday afternoon rolls around, we still haven’t gotten a breakdown of the closing costs, just a couple statements that we need to bring $12k to closing.  Of course since it takes more than 3 days to move money around, we wouldn’t be able to do that.  It turns out though that we didn’t need to bring the money to closing, we could FedEx a check to the title company a day or two later and that would be fine.  So at 3:30 on Monday, I get a call that they haven’t finished the paperwork, and could they move it back a few hours.  At this point I had already left work early, but we moved it to 7:30pm.  Still waiting for a new good faith estimate of the closing costs.

At 7:30pm the Notary shows up with a giant stack of paperwork to sign.  We spend the next hour or carefully reading and signing the 100 or so pages, on which there were a handful of errors.  Everything important seems to be right though, with the rate, term, and points we had agreed to.   I call Tyson to let him know the errors, and sign everything anyway.  The final total we had to pay out of pocket was around $6,000, or about half what we were told.  I’m just glad we had enough cash for it, or I would have been very pissed at having to sell some assets to get the extra cash that we didn’t actually need.

At this point I assume we’re closed,  and we’ll wait and see how it all plays out.