It Ain't Easy Buyin' Greene

Part 1

In spite of this story coming in chapters, it is still an abbreviated account. There was an awful lot of waiting on things to happen.


After looking at about a dozen houses each weekend for months, we finally had a list of five houses we thought met our needs, and the Greene house was one of them. But when we asked to take a second look, it had been pulled off the market because the owner had decided to rent it out instead of selling.

We went through the process of inspecting and bidding on two of the other houses, each failing in turn. The other houses also not viable for their own reasons. We then heard the Greene house was back on the market! We went back for our second look, got some more questions answered and reaffirmed our opinion that the house was a good fit and bid. We got outbid.

We started looking at more houses.

The other bid on the Greene house fell through. We negotiated and settled. Got the inspection and it passed easily. Were we buying a house?

Not yet. Before any bidding was done on any of the houses we had gotten a letter from our bank showing we were pre-approved for a mortgage loan in the approximate amount of our estimated maximum. Before we got to the bidding part of the Green house adventure, we got a letter from the bank saying very simply our loan application had been denied because we had insufficient credit history.

Carrie and I do not have, have never had, and do not intend to have credit cards. We don't have car loans to pay off because we both paid cash for our vehicles when we bought them. The only loan we'd ever had was the mortgage for our previous house in Mesa which we paid off early more than ten years ago. Ten years being the limit of what the credit reports see. Our credit is spotless because we have nothing there.

The letter we'd received didn't say the bank would like us to provide alternate credit information or let's try a different type of loan application. It just turned us down flat.

Of course I was on the phone trying to talk with the man who'd taken our application in the first place to get an alternative. We knew there was an alternative because how else would we have gotten our first mortgage? Carrie even went in person to the bank. What we finally ended up finding was that the first clerk could only handle ordinary straight forward mortgages. His supervisor was apparently even less versed. We had to talk to their specialized loan officer who worked the region and so was only sometimes in the bank.

Eventually we connected with her and found the info we would need to provide for the alternate mortgage application. Bank statements, recent paystubs, and letters of credit. Mostly they were interested in a full year's history of good customer with landlord and utilities.

A full year's.

We had not, at that time, been officially lodged in Maine for a full year.

Still, we got the letters from the landlord, the power company, and for our cell phone accounts. Mine was just over the one year point and Carrie's was even longer, so there was that one at least. We also got a letter from the local vet, since we'd already been going there, and got one from our previous vet in Arizona with its decades of our history. We also added the insurance company and AAA which were both respectable and long time. That, we thought, should do for their requirements.

When the time came, we brought all this in, after setting up an appointment with the wandering loan officer, along with the official signed agreed on price. The officer asked why we hadn't provided all this beforehand so we could have gotten the ball rolling earlier. Because we had only just gotten to the final signed agreed sale price, which per her email was one of the required documents. Oh, no, we could have provided her with the other stuff sooner. Why didn't she say so in the first place???

To be continued...