Moral-Flexibility.Net

So, as usual I’ve done my homework and read everything I can find on the subject, I’m conversant with the array of mortgage products and I think I have the major players lending guidelines figured out.

I have some numbers in my head, but I want some sort of official confirmation.

I call the mortgage broker recommended by my Mom, turns out the mortgage broker is now working for one of the big five banks. No biggie, I’m not ready to apply for financing yet, so I warn her that this is a meeting to discuss hypotheticals and to confirm my numbers, we’re not interested in proceeding further than that at this time.

No problem. We’ll see.

The day arrives and we attend the bank branch for our meeting. We’re kept waiting 15 minutes (for no readily apparent reason) and as we settle ourselves into a spartan office we’re asked for our bank cards.

Me:“Oh, we’re not customers of Mega-Uber-Bank. We’re more like financial mercenaries, dealing with a variety of Financial Institutions.”
Mortgage Guy:“We do reward customer loyalty…”
Me:“I already receive completely free banking through my credit union, lets move on to the mortgage.”

Now. I had given advance warning that this was to be a hypothetical discussion as to mortgage size, bridge financing and all sorts of other little housy related stuff.

MG:“I’ll just need to get your authorization to check….”
Me: “No. I’m not prepared to generate more inquiries on our credit reports, I can tell you our credit scores and we can proceed on that basis.”
MG:“It’s not really a credit hit, we use Transunion which is hardly used for credit reports”
Me:“True. Just little companies like yours, American Express, MBNA and a few other wee financial outfits. No, no credit check. Sorry.”

The conversation proceeded from there, I told him our credit scores and gave him our current obligations, agreed that lying was singularly pointless and further agreed that this was a hypothetical number crunch as there was no file created.

In the end we had my numbers confirmed (although I had overestimated the available equity in our present home, failing to consider 80% LTV would be the max they would advance).

Ok, so now we have our ballpark, it’s time to prep our place for sale.

I have to preface this with the statement that Lisa and I are more than a little risk averse. We are conservative in every aspect of our financial lives.

When we bought our current house we crunched the numbers, and figured out our maximum “affordable” price. We figured this was the number we could afford if we were both reduced to minimum wage jobs AND would still leave us off the “house poor” category.

Sound pessimistic? Yeah, probably, but that’s the way we roll.

Now, recently we had agreed amongst ourselves to explore the housing market and see if we could find something a little larger that we could occupy for years and years and that would address some concerns we have with our current home. My participation was a little reluctant as I love our current home and am loathe to pay closing costs and realtor fees.

The ceiling on cost was expanded for this exercise, although all calculations were made based on our present mortgage expense (changing our present accelerated bi-weekly extra to principal mortgage payment for an identically priced single monthly non-accelerated non-extra to principal mortgage payment) which increased the ceiling on purchase price approximately 100K from our present home.

Seem logical?

At the end of the day our mortgage payments would remain the same, but we’d be paying for 10 years more than with our current house (which presently has 12 years in payments left at the current rate).

Ok, so the basics had been thought out, next I needed professional verification or “proof of concept” to set my mind at ease. This meant meeting with a mortgage salesman, er…professional.

I’m still here, just feeling a little swamped recently.

The highlights are that my brother is visiting, we’re in the process of hunting for a new house (a long story in itself), we just bought a new TV (wow, 1080p really does make a difference!) and my brother gave me a toughbook in the hopes that it might encourage my blogging efforts (so here we are).

There has been lots and lots of mucking around with technology, but as is customary we’re going to be headed for the range and hopefully I’ll be posting some gun pron instead of this sort of babble in the near future.

Thanks for your patience folks!