Mortgage paperwork – now what?

You begin to see why this house moving/buying lark is considered one of the most stressful things you can do! Today got an email from both my solicitor and my financial adviser. The solicitor to say the mortgage company doesn’t accept the normal (electronic presumably) searches that they do and instead it has to be ‘paper’ searches which means they have to go to the local authority which costs more. On checking it turns out that this is the case for the original mortgage company…you know the one that turned us down. The good news was that the new mortgage company is fine with the electronic searches. Hurrah!

The financial adviser was emailing to say that we need to provide more paperwork for the new mortgage company, despite being able to check various things through experian we still have to provide 12 months of bank statements. Now I’m pretty organised, well all my statements are in the same place in my filing cabinet….however they aren’t exactly in date order! So I spent a good part of this evening going through all my bank statements for the last12 months of course sods law says that one is going to be missing! I ended up having to check back through statements going back to 2001 before finding I had the missing statement in a pile of documents elsewhere that I hadn’t actually filed yet D’oh

Anyway I’m really hoping that this is the last obstacle but I don’t think we’ll be moving by Christmas now which is such a shame. but as someone said you’ll definitely be by next Christmas and the house will be more habitable by then!

Victorian Ceiling Rose

Original Victorian Marble Fireplace

Second viewing

The second viewing of a property is the time to look at sensible things like the electrics, fuse boards, boiler condition etc etc. Also I have to say you’d generally have a second viewing BEFORE making your offer! However, as we are relocating and its a long journey we made the offer and have only just seen the property for the second time.

The second viewing was interesting for a number of reasons; firstly in some respects the house seemed smaller than in my memory I know this is because it was the only property we saw on saturday whereas when we viewed it the first time we saw 8 other properties so had those fresh in our minds for comparison. The main thing we noticed this time round was that in fact it is in much better condition than we thought/remembered. The floorboards are good although will need sanding and varnishing. The kitchen has a huge original fireplace which I didn’t notice first time because some terrible 1970’s style kitchen cupboards have been put in front of it. The boiler will probably work fine whilst we install underfloor heating so that’s great news since we’ll be moving in during the coldest time of the year! The fireplaces are as nice as I remembered (see photo). You can also see from the photo what I mean about the paint on the living room ceiling!

Credit Crunch bites…

So today I got the call I was really hoping not to get…the mortgage has been turned down by the lender. Sadly we are feeling the backlash of the credit crunch and with a huge list of reasons why they won’t lend to us from the downright ridiculous (your business isn’t in yellow pages!) to its 2 hours away from where you live now so effectively you’ll be starting business in a new area – errrr NO you damn idiots its a plumbing business which goes wherever the work is!!!! Grrrrrr So I guess the its a 6 bedroom house was just the easiest one to reject us on initially…they even think because the house needs work on it that we can’t live in it so therefore would have to rent somewhere as well! Surely it is our decision as to whether we can live in it or not everything works even if it doesn’t look pretty (it definitely doesn’t look pretty ) but apparently not, now lenders can decide this without even seeing a house.

So the next step is to fill a whole load more forms (Oh Joy! ) and apply to another lender, the thing is I know we will get this all sorted its just that I really want us to have the house by Christmas so we can make a start on all the work as I have lots of time off and know we could get loads done in 10 days. It is still possible so for now I’ll just have to keep up the positive thinking…

Mortgage Application – unexpected questions and problems…

When you apply for a mortgage each lender is different and even though I’ve had mortgages before they still managed to catch me out with a question I’d not been asked before! This time it was the name of the tax office that processes my tax return….I don’t really see the relevance but there you go! I’ve given it to them now so I thought I was home and dry…apparently not yet.

I met up with my financial adviser and completed the mortgage application online and due to the much talked about ‘credit crunch’ the rates were pretty rubbish especially as my partner is self employed. We decided on the lender and he rang them to check everything would be okay, and they were happy with everything so we completed the online form and it all went through…WooHoo of course in fairy tales that is where we end with the mortgage going fine and we live happily ever after Of course here in the real world this is what happened….

Friday at 5pm my financial adviser calls to say the mortgage lender has a problem with the house…have they seen it I ask? (knowing it needs a lot of work I thought this had put them off!) No he says. Well what don’t they like then? I ask. The house we are trying to buy is in a seaside town and it is large (for a british home ) it has 6 bedrooms on the details so that is what we put on the application although as I explained the master bedroom has been badly split to make it into 2 bedrooms and in doing so they have had to cover part of the original victorian ceiling rose, of course the first thing we will do is carefully rip down this wall thus converting the house back into 5 bedrooms. Apparently the lender doesn’t lend on guest houses and is concerned that we could try and do that in the future (or we are lying now and plan on doing that!) so its a combination of a large house in a seaside town that appears to be a problem.

Anyway my adviser has gone back to the lender and explained the above (no way am I running a guest house far too much work and my breakfasts are rubbish!)

The next concern is that as we are relocating how can they be sure my partner would continue getting work so we explain that he is a plumber so it really doesn’t matter where he lives a good plumber ALWAYS has plenty of work, I mean lets be honest even the rubbish plumbers always have work!

So we are now waiting to hear if we have overcome these hurdles and it really just goes to show that even when you make phone calls to the lenders to try and avoid wasting everyones time by applying for a mortgage when they won’t lend to you or on the house things can and almost certainly will still come up. I am still confident that the mortgage will go through and I’d rather they did this now before they cash my cheque for the survey than after they’ve cashed it!

House offer… accepted what now?

We had great news that our offer was accepted WOOOOOHOOOOO of course because the house seller was taking his time thinking about the price and that we didn’t have to sell to buy his property and therefore were chain free we only found out just before we left for a long weekend away.

So it was a mad bit of checking around for an online solicitor to deal with the conveyancing of the purchase. Today was the first day back in the office so I’ve been madly gathering all the information that is needed. For those that haven’t purchased a house before the main things you need are proof of identity and proof of current address, here in the UK you can use your passport or driving licence for ID proof and utility bills in your name for the address proof. Your driving licence can be used for both as it has your current address on it. For ease I will be sending my passport, driving licence and electric bill. I then have to send this all with a cheque for local authority searches, this is essential and there is no way of avoiding it, the solicitor will check for any planning applications in the area and in some areas you have to have a coal mining search….always good to know that your new home isn’t going to disappear into a large hole overnight!

Once that’s done and dusted its just a case of getting the mortgage application forms completed so I’ve fixed a meeting with my financial adviser for tomorrow where I will fill in the various details but as my partner lives the otherside of the country at present I will have to snailmail it across to him for signature.

Hopefully we can get all the paperwork that we have to do completed this week and then it all falls into the hands of the solicitors which is a mixed blessing as it can seem that nothing is happening for weeks…the process needs speeding up in my opinion but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon! And I really doubt that the new home information packs (HIPS) are going to affect things in a positive way, still I’d love to be proven wrong on this!