Last year we tried to refinance our house, after our meetings with realtors indicated that we'd never sell our house for what it was worth. The appraiser told the bank, up front, that a visit to our home would be a waste of his precious time. What a snob! Apparently, our house had lost too much value, in his estimation, to make it worthy of this guy's time. So, we decided to wait it out a year and see what happened.
A year passed.
Our excellent credit scores and history qualified us for a 3% mortgage rate when we refinanced. Compiling and submitting all the necessary paper work and information was a bit of a headache, but we completed all the assigned tasks set forth by our bank and waited for the big appraisal day. I spent the whole of the day cleaning madly--deep cleaning--because sparkliness could help boost our home value, right?
Our plan
- First, we would refinance our house at a lower interest rate.
- Then we would rent it out (and we had someone already interested in renting our home!) until we had the house completely paid off. It was a retirement investment.
- And in the meantime, we would buy a bigger house closer to town.
The appraiser was scheduled to arrive at 5pm. And our realtor was scheduled to arrive at 6:30pm.
We were anxious and excited.
And then, at 3pm, the appraiser called Clarke.
Can you guess what he said?
More or less, he expressed to Clarke that his visit to our home would be a waste of time because our home had lost another 10-15 thousand in value over the past year and if we wanted to refinance we would have to pay $10,000.00 in closing costs!
Um, no.
Thanks for nothing.
*insert sound of hopes being crushed to death*
It doesn't matter that we've never been late or missed a mortgage payment in the last NINE years and that we have very little debt and awesome credit scores.
Moral of the story:
Our floors could have been paved in pure gold and our walls could have been solid marble and it would have made no difference.
Just plain bad luck. Again.
