House: it’s ours! I think…
This morning, right around lunch time, Ben at our mortgage broker called up with some awesome news: we have unconditional approval from the lender for the purchase. That’s the last piece of the puzzle: we’re now “unconditional” on the contract, so I rang the realtor and let him know, and he said he’d forward me the details of the trust account to transfer the deposit.
It took him a bit to do that, as he was driving, but it made it in time for us to perform the transfer in-person at the bank (the transfer amount being well above the amount I’m able to transfer online). Naturally, because I’m paranoid, I called up to confirm the BSB and account number before transferring a significant amount of money across. In the mean time though we had plenty of homework: off to a different bank branch (the local branch of our future lender), to do some identification procedures, and set up a new account to hold the money they’ll draw the payments from.
We’d briefly considered transferring all of our personal banking there, but frankly we’re fairly happy where we are and the online stuff of the new lender doesn’t seem as good as what we have. I know that there are other banks in Australia that have significantly better online user experiences, and our mortgage broker advised us that the loan we’ve selected was one that was easy to qualify for, it’s entirely possible we would get a better deal refinancing in a couple of years (we have an introductory rate discount for two years, after which we’ll pay whatever their market interest rate is)… and if we refinanced away to a different lender in two years it does not seem worthwhile spending all the effort to change our finances over.
Then again, of course a mortgage broker would say that as they’d get paid again for organizing another mortgage… but so far Ben and the mob he works for haven’t steered us wrong yet.
So as far as the house goes, at this stage it’s pretty much ours. To my understanding the only thing that could fuck us is if the bank decides not to pay out on settlement because the valuation of the property has changed significantly, pushing us above their LVR limit. As I understand it, this can happen, but is exceptionally rare on existing households. Given that we have some wiggle room in the LVR, have a fairly short settlement date (it stayed at June 18th!), will continue saving in the mean time, and have some stuff we can liquidate if the shit hits the fan I think the risk of this happening is pretty well mitigated.
So all that remains is the bunch of small tasks between now and settlement! Frankly though, the process has been so fast and smooth that we keep wondering if it’s inevitable that something will go wrong…
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