It turned out to get really frustrating working with 5th 3rd.  They gave us a conditional preapproval but said they wouldn’t finance us until February.  Initially they said they would accept hubby’s prison work history, but after I went to all the trouble to get it and send it to them… they said we still had to wait.  Needless to say that pissed me off.  So then my parent’s said they would cosign and they have excellent credit.  Fifth Third STILL was going to make us wait until February!  Between all the lengthy delays and not hearing from them in a timely manner, I finally got fed up and said “screw them”.

So, we went to Strategic Mortgage as recommended by our realtor.  I explained what I had been through with 5th 3rd right off the bat and made it clear that I expected quicker results and for them to be straight up about our situation.  They said they didn’t see any reason why we wouldn’t get approved, even with hubby being 3 months short of the 2 year work history.  We have had some frustrating moments in our communications, but we finally got our preapproval!

We had found a house on 3 acres that we really liked.  But 2 hours before we were about to make an offer, they took it off the market and we haven’t been able to reach the bank that owns it.  So, we continued looking and found another 1,800sqft property in a nice neighborhood for a really good deal.  We just made an offer on it last night… literally… in the middle of the night!!  So, we are just waiting now.  Fingers crossed!

Our realtors have been fantastic!  We have been working with a second agent while our primary is out of town.

The house we are buying needs some roof repairs and a small amount of drywall repairs.  Because of that, we have to go with a FHA 203k rehab loan.  We can’t use straight FHA apparantly.  That sucks a bit because the 203k loan has a slightly higher interest rate.  Not much… about .25% higher.

The lender was trying to get us to use the Ohio Financing Agency (OHFA) grant that offers 2.5% of the purchase price for down payment and an interest rate increase of 5%.  I just told him that’s not the program we want to use.  The city of Columbus has a better program that offers up to 6% or $5,000 of the purchase price for down payment, closing costs, and/or principle reduction.  There is no interest rate increase with that one that I know of.  So you can see, that is a much better first time home buyer down payment assistance program.

We lowered the price on my parents home by $2,000.   We are hoping that if we move out, it may help people see the potential of the house better.  Of course, we will leave some furniture for staging purposes, but I do think it will be much easier this way.  I’m tired of constantly having to keep this house spotless anyway!  Haha!

Everyone… keep your fingers crossed and pray for us that we get our first home!!

It was a very fun and pleasant experience.  Our agent was very nice and not at all pushy.  He gave us just the right amount of space to look around, but still answer questions.

The homes we looked at were a bit depressing though.  We looked at 5 that we had previously driven by and ended up only liking 1 of them.  It’s very different going inside then just looking in the windows.  We realized a lot of problems that we didn’t notice from the windows.  One of the major issues for me was the layout of the living room or no bathroom on the main floor.  But, HUD updated their listings today and I have found several new houses to look at.  The houses are all selling so quickly though!

Still haven’t heard about our preapproval.  Keeping our fingers crossed.  The mortgage guy said it would probably be a week to a week and a half before we got an answer.

I am a bit disappointed that we have not had more showings.  I see all the homes I want to look at selling like hot cakes, but we haven’t had any offers on our home.  I am sure the price is good and it’s a very nice home for the money.  I think it’s downfall is it has a car port and not a garage.  Also that the school levy failed in this city and now there are a lot of problems because of it.  We are running out of time.  We are going to miss the deadline for the tax credit if we don’t find a buyer soon.