And the Saga goes on...

Well, since July 11th came and went, we just had to guess that there was another extension, though nothing official was said. We found out later that if we didn't have the house under contract, the bank probably wouldn't have even considered trying to salvage it. It just would have sat with all that water damage. And then who would want it? So in a sense, our contract saved the house from total ruin. At the time, there were so many houses in short sale, pre-foreclosure and foreclosure that the banks just didn't want to bother with more problems from them. You would think that they would want to just get rid of this property already, but still they dragged their feet. We were in a sort of "stalled state" or "limbo". We couldn't pursue another house since we were still under contract. But nothing was going forward either.

Somewhere in the middle of all that "nothing," we found out we couldn't get a conventional mortgage, which we were previously approved for....WHAT? Oh you have got to be kidding! Don't really understand how that all worked, or rather didn't work. We have really good credit and little debt. First it seemed like the mortgage company thought Ben was self-employed since he was working from home. We solved that issue with proof that he is not self-employed, but then there was some other excuse, like he has been with the company for only a short time. I swear it felt like they were looking for any excuse not to give us a mortgage. And it's not like we wanted some ridiculous one either, we just wanted a normal conventional 30 year. We're not stupid enough to fall for an ARM! duh. I guess with all the people that are in trouble with those kinds of mortgages (amongst trying to flip or live beyond their means) it was getting tougher and tougher to get even a regular mortgage. Ok. Let's not panic. Ben started doing research and he found some sort of government mortgage called a 203k. It was perfect for us because it helps people buy houses that need to be fixed up but don't have the up front cash to fix it. This was an option if the bank wanted to go the route of reducing the price of the house by how much was needed for the repairs. It had its pros and cons. We worked with that mortgage as far as we could go. Obviously, since we still didn't know what the bank's decision was, we couldn't actually put a mortgage amount on it. We just needed to know what the bank would do: either reduce the cost of the house, or give us a check for the repairs at closing. It was obvious that they weren't going to have it fixed for us since we already passed the second closing date of July 11th. And that was fine, because we could then choose our own flooring etc. But we were ready, or so we thought.