Today Dr. Fiancée (she’ll be Dr. Wife as of Saturday afternoon!) and I are closing on a house in the small town where we’ll be moving once she completes residency.  We weren’t going to purchase a home at this point, but when another house we’d looked at went under contract, we started looking again.

The house we’re purchasing today had gone through a couple of price reductions since we’d first seen it on Zillow.  Dr. F looked at me and said, “I want this house,” so I went to work.

I paid cash for my current house.  My parents very graciously gifted me a large sum of money, and I paid a portion of it back over the course of five years.  That made the home-buying process relatively easy.

This time, we took out a mortgage.  That has made the home-buying process considerably more involved.  It hasn’t been hard, but it’s been a major source of stress for the past month.

Basically, once I was pre-approved for the mortgage, a seemingly endless stream of requests for documentation followed.  The IRS does not ask for this much documentation when filing income taxes.  Thankfully, my budgeting software and easy Internet access to all relevant accounts made it easy enough to gather up the information the bank requested.

What was challenging was the uncertainty of when and what the bank would need.  I tried to ask them a few times what I should expect, and it was often a case of, “we will let you know.”  Sometimes, days would go by without any correspondence, then I’d be hunting multiple pieces of obscure transactions.

At one point, I was about $100 over the debt-to-income ratio.  Fortunately, I’d paid off my cards (I pay them in full every month), but I had to produce that evidence to the bank.  Once I realized that, I kept credit card spending to an absolute minimum, and instead paid cash.  I also dipped into gift cards as much as possible.

But I started to figure out the logic of the process, to the point that I could roughly anticipate what the bank might need.  I learned that they liked big chunks of information showing transactions over long periods.  If I had something favorable I could share with them, I would often do so, unprompted.  I have learned that volunteering too much information can be detrimental, but I started to get a sense of what they wanted to see, and would act accordingly.

To make the down payment for the loan, I raided every retirement account that would not result in a penalty.  I was on the phone with various healthcare providers and my dentist to track down old bills so I could get reimbursements from my HSA.  I took a large amount of principle out of my Roth IRA (you can remove principle, but not growth, invested in a Roth IRA before retirement age without penalty).

I managed to pull together the necessary funds—and to prove to the bank that I had them—and get final approval late last week.  Praise the Lord!

So, barring some unforeseen catastrophe (gulp!), yours portly and Dr. Fiancée should be the proud new owners of a nice house in our new town.

Now we just have to sell hers and mine.  Gulp!