Here We Are

Here we are in Indiana. It has been a busy couple months and things are just now slowing down.

How did we get here?

My husband started his job in Ohio on October 23. During that time, we lived started out in an extended stay hotel. We went through a little uncertainty with the sell of our KC home. However, that got wrapped up and crazy enough, closed on the original date from our first contract. It was super fast!

Long story short, we spent two weeks in the hotel and looking at houses every chance we got. We knew that we had to be back in KC on the third week, but knew our time in extended stay was not over. We got kicked out of our hotel (crazy, crazy story with liars and crazy women) and got $1000s of unapproved charges on our credit card from the hotel. In the meantime, we had a debacle in house searches. We found a house that we liked. Got ready to put an offer on it only to find out the tax rate for Dayton and Montgomery County is outrageous. If you have a $1500 house payment, over $500 of that is taxes. No Thank You!

On Halloween, we switched agents and states. Kent's job is 10 minutes from the border of Indiana. We went on November 1st and looked at six houses. All six would have been perfectly fine. We were way happier than any of the 50 houses we had walked through in Ohio. We quickly narrowed down our options to two. One was more expensive and bigger, the other was brand new and days from being finished. After some discussion amongst agents, the family in the first house wasn't willing to move in our time frame. So, we chose the new house. Contract negotiated and accepted.

I immediately emailed the agent who helped me with pre approval on the mortgage. Two days later (it went that long because things were crazy with hotel and trip back to KC), I finally called. The agent was no longer with the company and I got transferred around to the right person. It was now November 4 at 10 pm.

After explaining the situation, I told the mortgage agent that I wanted to close on November 21 so we could be in a home before the holidays started. That was 17 days. Let me tell you, there was nobody who thought this loan could be closed out in 17 days. Too many things had to fall into place perfectly and that was still no guarantee.

I had a crazy amount of faith and calm. I never doubted. I had every document I needed and the time to call everyday for updates. I scheduled the movers to be there on November 21 and I was not letting anyone convince me this couldn't be done.

There were hurdles and bumps along the way. Nothing I could control and nothing I could fix. We had delays in getting Kent's employment verified. There was confusion over property tax because Indiana is weird with property tax. There were delays with insurance and info that wasn't provided properly. They were small, but all threatened to delay closing.

I won't lie, those small things eventually frayed my nerves. We were living in a very small room at the local Best Western. It rained non stop over those ten days. The relocation company became increasingly difficult to deal with and I was still fighting with the previous hotel on charges.

It was stressful, but things got more exciting as the day got closer. We did close on our house on November 21. It was a 17 day turn around and the fastest some of our mortgage agents had ever seen.

Our lead agent was a christian man. He did amazing things behind the scenes. Things I didn't know about until the day of close. He immediately contacted the title company and keep in constant contact with them. He did magic with our closing numbers. We went to close with less than 5% of our home cost. I still have no clue how he managed to do all that.

Moving in was no small fete in itself. It was terrible, our worst yet. I think I'll save that for another post. It took one week exactly to get completely unpacked, situated and decorated inside the house. It shouldn't have taken that long, but was a result of very poor packing.

I'll have to write another post on how surprised I am by how different this is from our Ohio experience. It has been wonderful!