Stress!

[flea]

Looking for a house is okay; we are still in the "figuring out what we want and what is available and what we can afford" phase. It's still sort of windowshopping; until we get down there it probably won't dawn on me that we have to actually BUY one of these houses.

But talking to mortgage brokers is stressful like whoa. I hate anything that implies that prices are negotiable - I am like the anti-haggler - and I still feel very at sea about the whole process. Lender #1 writes, "do you plan to pay taxes and fees with the payments" and all I want to do is write back "How the fuck should I know?"

ION, we are doing THREE full-day interviews for my search committee next week, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. And one more at a time yet to be determined. The good news is, this means nice dinners out with the candidates. The bad news is, intense! And now that the names of people we are interviewing are released, another layer of stress, as one is an internal candidate and another is local and the spouse of a former employee (who left to have kids).

Book club is discussing Suite Francaise tonight; I LOVED it, and I really don't like much fiction. I regret that it's unfinished - there are only the barest notes of where she intended to go with it, and they were surprising to me given what exists - the story about the author and the circumstances surrounding its 60-year delayed publication are as much of a novel as the work itself.

Comments

[cofax7]

Taxes and Fees: some lenders want your property taxes and insurance to be rolled into your costs at the time of purchase, because they don't trust you to pay them yourself. It's the same costs, either way, but if you pay them yourself you don't have to pay them at the time you're giving the escrow company every dime you ever made and then some. Depends, I expect, on what your expected income is going to be and what your property taxes might be and whether you'll be able to scrape that up on a twice-yearly basis. I pay my taxes myself, but sometimes it's a little difficult to cough up the cash.

Suite Francaise! My sister loved that, I should borrow it. The story around the novel was just amazing, the way her daughters carried it with them for so long.

[noradeirdre.livejournal.com]

We pay our taxes with our monthly mortgage payment. What kind of fees is he talking about?

Sadly, house buying is all about the haggling, which we were shocked to discover. Basically, you try to offer what YOU think it's worth. We ended up paying the asking price and were bummed about it because we'd originally offered much less. I try to tell myself that when we sat down to make the offer we were expecting to pay the full price, but it still burns.

Basically, if you haggle on nothing else, haggle on a house. I sure could done with having a mortgage $15K less than what we have. It matters.

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

When I refinanced, I chose to pay my taxes directly to the town. I prefer to have control of it. The only fees I had ever had rolled into a mortgage payment was the mortgage insurance I had to get because my original down payment was so small. That disappeared when I refinanced, too.