Price Tag

We invite you to listen to the following and consider it a soundtrack to this post :)

Yesterday we received a copy our final closing paperwork to review and had the pleasure of going to the bank and getting the cashier's check for the closing!  We are signing the paperwork and paying our down-payment first thing Monday morning and now we are all prepared.  

Since our last update a few things have changed.  The sellers had agreed to fix the sewer pipe, but had been waiting on the neighbors to decide how they were going to go about fixing their part of the problem.  The neighbor's sewer line is tied into our line, so we cannot fix ours until they disconnect theirs.  It is out of city code to have a connected sewer line so in order to fix ours we would have had to cut them off and leave them high and dry.  Literally.  The neighbors wanted to be sure that they had all their information and all their possible price options (completely understandable) before moving forward and ended up scheduling their sewer to be re-routed yesterday.  We are glad that this is done and we will not have to enter the house with neighbor issues right off the bat, but it unfortunately did not leave enough time for the sellers to fix their pipe before Monday.  Because the sewer is such a large expense that we will now have to take on, the sellers have agreed to pay our closing costs, plus reimburse us for our home inspection.  This is great since it is very likely that our sewer will be unusable once the neighbors is disconnected (leaving a gaping hole in the side of our pipe) so we will need to be able to fix our pipe right away.  With the money that is freed up by not having to pay any closing costs, we were able to schedule our sewer replacement for Wednesday, our very first full day with the new house!  We'll be stepping right into it.  So to speak.

So this left us with a nice even bill of our 10% down payment.  Just 10% of a whole house.  No biggie.  We went to the bank yesterday and picked up a nice fat check for that amount.  Which was kind of weird.  And we get to hang onto that check until Monday.  We're not at all paranoid about that one.  Nah. 

The only other question mark is that paperwork.  Try to understand that.  Apparently the paper work has changed in the past few years to make everything more transparent and avoid fraud, but from everything we've heard this has really just made it more confusing when you're dealing with a bank that wasn't committing fraud anyway.  Every item has to be explained, and there are probably some things that we really don't even need to understand.  When you get your car fixed, you don't need to know every little thing the guy did, you just need to know that the problem is fixed and your car is running and he charged you a reasonable amount.  We also try to remind ourselves that it is really not in the bank's best interest for anything on these forms to be wrong and that it would be just as much or more of a headache for them to fix things after the fact.  On the other hand, this is our house and finances that we're talking about here, so we want to be sure that everything is clear.  So we're trying to walk that line between what we need to understand and what we don't and what affects us and what doesn't.  For example, since the sellers are paying all the fees and one time charges, we don't need to worry about any of those because they will never affect us.  However, they are also paying all of our up front costs like taxes and insurance, so if any of that was wrong, or if we didn't understand something, it could mean a surprise for us later.  We're doing our best to walk that line.

Long story short, we'll be signing everything Monday morning.  The bank will review all the paperwork one more time and then sometime Tuesday afternoon our agent will get the go-ahead to give us the key.  Then, first thing Wednesday it's sewer time!  We are still packing and packing and we're looking forward to the next few days!