• Do they give you trash buckets/bins or do you have to buy/bring your own? Do they even allow buckets?
  
• Is there pizza delivery in your area?
  
• Is there dial-up/DSL/cable/FIOS in your area? Who's the provider(s)?
  
• I want my TV/computer/refrigerator/giant fish tank in this area, are there enough/right types of plugs for it?
  
• You decide you want a garden, but your house and backyard is under enough trees that the only valid place for a garden would be in the middle of the front lawn.

Mandals fucked around with this message at 18:13 on May 17, 2013

• It just so happened to work out that we wound up getting the first house we viewed. Technically before this one we walked through an open house HUD home without our realtor but that was on a whim while we were checking out a neighborhood and the house was a nasty busted nightmare and we had the face as soon as we walked in, so it doesn't really count but certainly set the bar at what a fix'er-upper would have been like. But the first proper one we went though just happened to be it, and we knew by the end of that day and having viewed a few other respectable but not quite there alternatives. We went through a lot of soul searching and letting parents and siblings also view it to make sure we weren't being clueless newbies.
  
• They had a buyer fall through with funding at the last minute in march and they had to put it back on the market. Upside: we had a motivated seller and very fair price, plus we were given a full inspection report from march that gave us a head start on or own inspection, plus they had already done a round of repairs for the other buyer so there really wan't a lot to push back on, in the end we had them fix two double-hung windows that had busted springs and that was it. Downside: they wanted a 5 day inspection period instead of 10, and our earnest money went hard after inspection, aka. they didn't want to get burned as badly as they did with the previous buyer. Not a bad tradeoff if you're serious about buying and have solid financing
  
• We were initially going through our credit union for the mortgage as it just sort of made sense since we bank with them and generally like them. Well, their mortgage department did a little too good of a job of not really explicitly disclosing that they're a broker. We needed to close 30 days after the offer was accepted but when I went back to them they said whoa whoa whoa, we need 45 days because we have to send this out to lender X and have no guarantees of them getting it back to us within 30 days. I was a little furious that this wasn't explicitly communicated earlier on, but our realtor recommended a private lending company to go to directly and they wound up taking it and getting it all done within 30 days. They did our pre-qualification form on the same day we called them whereas our CU took over a week to turn around the same pre-qual document . Lesson learned: shop around for lenders and tease it out of them if they're a broker or a direct lender, don't just go with the first one who says you qualify. Also, don't get fooled by sales tactics, you'll request something like a pre-qualification document, a work sheet for origination charges and other estimates, and you'll send them a bunch of your documents for them to check you out. They'll start using language like "thank you for choosing us for your home loan" but you haven't chosen them, you are evaluating what they have to offer. That was an easy one for us to sort of overlook and forget about. Thankfully our realtor helped shake us out of it and let us realize we weren't beholden to any lender yet. We also got a .1% lower rate (and lower origination fees) out of the whole thing so if we were smart up front we would've taken the lender we are with now right from the start. It was just such a relief to have that first pre-qual document that it's easy to just go with it instead of rounding up a few more and really checking out your options.
  
• If you're lucky enough to have a budget that allows you choose a down payment above some minimum, and once you've chosen a lender, it's important to scan their worksheet to see if they're tacking any of the closing costs back into the loan amount. It's handy to do that when you're on a tight budget and the closing costs are threaten to push you into the red, definitely. But if you are budgeting to cover the down payment and all expected closings, then make sure the loan amount is exactly for the portion of the purchase price that your down payment isn't covering. It's one of those things where 90% of people in that spot won't notice a couple thousand in closing fees getting rolled into the loan (or just assume it has to work that way), and for the lender that's some easy extra interest to collect on. In our case we were comfortable putting 8% down and had another ~5% behind it to cover closing costs plus a moving in budget. They put us at 8% down but initially the loan amount was for around 93.5% due to closing fees added back in. We just asked them to keep the loan amount strictly at 92% and that we would pay all those fees, well, about 4 hours ago today. I guess you have to give them one free pass at trying to fatten their margin, they took it off without a fuss, but I'm sure were happy to leave it in the other 90% of the time when nobody says anything.
  
• My wife is a canadian citizen here on a 3 year TN-1 work visa (NAFTA-based, among the easiest visas to get) which expires next month. Meanwhile we've applied for her green card and intend to transition to that. The problem is we don't have all that documentation back yet (The visa takes forever, but there's interim documents that we should get in the next couple weeks) and that makes it tough to prove she'll remain eligible to work after the TN-1 expires. All this to say it became a problem during underwriting, and if you've never navigated the fun world of US immigration BOY HOWDY is it that a treat. Eventually we figured out what all was needed to satisfy the book keeping (copy of marriage license & documents with our green card case #, plus my income alone would qualify for the loan amount but we either needed to prove hers or strike it from all the documents). Our loan agent and the underwriter had never really encountered a corner case like ours (where my wife's immigration status is in a transition) but was a rockstar in figuring out what was needed from a bureaucratic perspective. A high point in stress because it was never discovered this would be a problem until it came time to do the loan docs.
  
• Slept poorly last night, had nightmares where we had moved in and all this impossible, unexpected poo poo started happening. The living room dimensions were suddenly like 1/3 what we thought they were, so the couch was longer than any wall so it had to go in at an angle kind of in the middle of the room, the doorways were lowered so i was at risk of hitting my head any time I entered or left a room, the kitchen was abysmally small and only one person could stand in it at all, one of the steps on the stairway was on the verge of completely caving in, both our cars couldn't physically fit in the 2-car garage, etc. And each time we'd encounter one of these major problems it was as though we should have known all along but just never noticed it on the multiple visits we took to it over the past month. "Gah crap! The living room is 4' by 6.5' why didn't we NOTICE THAT?!?" as we're trying to drag furniture into it, fun stuff like that. Thanks a lot, brain.

Bhaal fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 18, 2013

Mandals fucked around with this message at 19:55 on May 18, 2013