house hunting, ball rolling

after a few weeks of blah blah blah finally the ball is rolling a bit. we waited for the appraisal and now the mortgage bank finally has a report for the value of the house. apparently the value was pretty low because of the condition of the foreclosure - so that is good in the long term for lower taxes, but worse in the short term since that means our loan amount is basically 95% of the value of the house, and we'll have to pay some monthly amount for mortgage insurance.

on the purchaser's side, we made a request for a lower price because of some water damage and roof repair. the selling bank has asked several contractors to give estimates for the repairs in order to assess the value, to see if our request of $10k is justifiable. this is a good thing because they will most likely give us some amount of price drop as a result, soon.

a few snags still remain. we've finally cleared all the transfers between the bank statements. one transfer i made in order to pay the downpayment, which was actually my money that was in my parents' bank account, had to be written off as a Gift so that it won't be seen as a personal loan. also, certain things apparently shouldn't be mentioned to both parties, ie saying that "the roof needs to be fixed" in order to explain a lower loan amount is bad for the mortgage because then they'd think the house purchase was risky. ugh. so keeping quiet and letting them ask the questions is best.

and online banks are retarded. i think financial institutions in general are retarded. amtrust won't provide me with electronic copies of my past statements, which i need to prove some other transfers i have. fortunately the mortgage bank would be ok with copies of old statements that show the account number, included with the printout of current activity, so at least they're not too anal about that.

if all works well, we'll be able to close next week. at current interest rates, this house is a steal. can't wait to start work on it.