A big part of the American dream is to own a big mortgage,
and a little piece of a home. If owning one home in America is a good thing,
owning two must be awesome. So my wife and I bought our first, and then our
second home in Miami. We have a lovely house in Coral Gables, next to the
University of Miami where I work, and a condo in Hollywood Beach. The two poor immigrants were now part of the American
dream.
Then we started thinking that our perfectly fine 1200 square
feet condo in Hollywood was not good enough for us. So we, the embodiment of
rationality, thriftiness, prudence, and frugality, acquired on an impulse a
third home, and a third mortgage. Ora and I saw a unit for sale in the same
building of our condo, and we fell in love with it. All of a sudden the view
from our condo, which had mesmerized us for the last two years, was not
spectacular enough. All of a sudden the place was not big enough to accommodate
our son and his wife.
Our congenial mortgage broker, who had helped us with
previous loans, told us that we would have no problem getting a third mortgage.
“For you, no problem” she said. Reassured, we proceeded to put an offer at full
price, and then some, to make sure that we got this particular unit. In a
moment’s notice, rationality went out the window. But what a window that was! With
unobstructed views of the Atlantic Ocean and the intra-costal, we fell in love
with the place the way suckers fall prey to whatever the Property Bothers sell
them on TV.
The process began simply enough, requesting salary
statements, W2 forms, printouts of bank accounts; the usual stuff of mortgage
applications. Then the mortgage company had to look into the financials of
the condo association and our credit score going back to the destruction of the
second temple. After an interminable series of emails, phone calls, faxes,
texts, scans, pdf files and more emails, phone calls, texts, and scans, we were
told that the building did not pass certain Fannie Mae Freddie Mac mortgage certificate
of estoppel reserves escrow HUD deed warranty of good behavior, and that the mortgage
company would be able to give us only 70% of the value of the house. That was
the first time we heard about such possibility. I started getting a little more
worried.
Every time I looked at the computer there was another email
from the mortgage company requesting twenty more documents going back years
about every financial transaction that I had ever done or considered doing. At
that point, I thought that the inquisition would have been a breeze.
Because Ora and I were so rational, controlled, measured,
and prudent, we made our offer unconditional
to make sure that we got THIS unit and that NOBODY ELSE did. So, we could not
get out of the deal on account of not getting a mortgage. Well, perhaps the
inspection could save us, but it happened so early in the process that the
mortgage company had not yet initiated its inquisition. So, in summary, we were
stuck and we were being screwed by a mortgage company that kept blaming Freddie
Mac and Fannie Mae and JP Morgan and Countrywide and the Democratic Party for
putting in place so many requirements for a second home mortgage. And every day
the mortgage broker would contact us to let us know that there is a NEW law
that they did not know about that pretty much required that they conduct a
financial colonoscopy of our entire family.
All I could think about at this stage was Kafka. We were in
the midst of a Kafkaesque play, and there was no way out. I dreaded going to
the computer to read the new requirements and the emails going back and forth
between the various mortgage company employees, our lawyer, and us about estoppels,
escrows, underwriting, insurance, inspections, appraisals, taxes, condo fees,
reconciliation fees, flood insurance, HUD warranty deeds, reserves, transfers
of money, new printouts of bank accounts, and new salary stubs. Whatever I had
submitted last month was no longer valid, so it was a Sisyphean financial
bolder all over again.
Ora kept reinforcing me and praising my patience and
organizational skills for being able to produce the Amazonian quantity of
paperwork required. As I tried to cope with the tsunami of requests I asked
myself, “and why do we need this headache?” At that moment I realized that we
had just become full-fledged Americans.
