Finding My Home (Part 6)

In Finding My Home Part 5, I talked about the importance of explaining, and justifying, the “why” behind wanting to buy a home. I also covered how it helped strengthen our marriage while also preparing us to take the necessary step towards the decision to actually commit to buying our first house.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the financial part of the process, how we started to take steps towards buying a home, and the challenges we experienced along the way.

Part 6. We finally made the decision to start the homebuying process and were immediately disappointed with the results.

I may have mentioned this before but the decision to buy a house didn’t happen overnight. For us, it was months of discussion, contemplation, and deliberation.

It started out as small discussions and then grew into larger discussions over the course of many months. It also started out as discussions between the two of us and then grew into discussions with other family members and friends. We knew we could read 20 million different articles about “everything you need to know when buying your first house,” but we felt it was helpful to also get firsthand accounts from people we know and trust.

I guess that’s why it took so long for us to pull the trigger. I think that’s also why, when we did make the decision to buy a house and finally started to take action, we immediately jumped into action without doing enough financial legwork. We had finally decided to start the steps to buy a house, and we had discussed how we were going to go about doing that, financially speaking, but instead of taking the appropriate steps to secure the home first by getting our finances in order, we went straight to the bank to see if we’d qualify for a loan.

This was a mistake.

We didn’t do any research on financial institutions because we assumed that they would all have similar resources and therefore we could use whichever one was eager to have our business. My mom recommended her credit union and we felt it was just as good as any other credit union or bank, so we went with them.

This became a problem because we didn’t have an established relationship with them, and so I didn’t feel that they took our best interests into account. It felt more like they wanted our business without wanting what was best for us. This may have been entirely in my head, but it still felt frustrating to me.

When we met with a home loan representative from the credit union, he took down all of our information, had us fill out a bunch of forms, and then ran our credit to see what interest rate we’d qualify for. Like I mentioned earlier, we had made plans to improve our finances but we haven’t actually put them into play yet. (Not a well-thought out plan.)

Looking back now, I think that the discussion of buying a house took so long and so much out of us, that when we started finally taking steps towards achieving that goal, we rushed into just doing the things that would allow us to fulfill it quickly so as not to change our minds. It was like reverse buyers remorse. We finally made a decision and were pulling the trigger before we were ready.

The result: two poor credit scores securing us some pretty high interest rates on our loans. Yikes.

I don’t know why I thought that the process would be really easy from that point on, but it wasn’t, and finding out that my credit was low and that I had a lot of catching up to do before we could qualify for a loan with a better interest-rate was extremely discouraging to me. I wanted it to be easier than that. We had taken forever to finally get to this point, and I wanted it to be easy from there on out, but that’s not life.

I wanted the home loan officer to help us understand what we needed to do to get a lower rate, but he didn’t seem very knowledgeable in that area. That made sense. He wasn’t a credit advisor. He was only a home loan officer. You’d think the two jobs went hand-in-hand, but turns out they don’t. This meant that we had to do our own research about what to do to improve our credit.

I left feeling an extreme sense of discouragement and I let it stay with me for a really long time. After that initial meeting, I didn’t want to talk about buying a house anymore and I think we put the brakes on for like six months.

In my head, my credit score should have been good enough to qualify us for a lower interest-rate. The fact that it wasn’t, and that the home loan officer couldn’t offer us any advice as to improve it, made me feel like getting a home was a hopeless cause and there was nothing we could do to fix it. That’s just how discouragement hits me sometimes. I just get down and feel that I’ll never get to the point where I need to be—in this case, improving our credit enough to qualify for a home loan with a lower interest rate.

This is a really common thinking error of mine.

My sweet husband was very patient. He understood that I needed to mourn a little bit and get through this hurdle and that it meant that we would just put this on pause and wait for a bit.

Looking back now, I realize that I needed to get through the frustration of wanting something so bad but finding that it was a more difficult process than I originally thought. And that’s OK.

It’s OK for me to experience difficulties. It’s OK for me to experience hardship. It’s OK for things to not go seamlessly for me. In fact, it’s probably better for me that things are hard and that they don’t always go the way I want them to.

In this situation, I probably overreacted and dragged my feet for a little too long on initiating the process again, but I needed to go through that disappointment my own way, and that’s OK. It’s OK to get sad or mad or frustrated or angry when something doesn’t go your way. It’s OK to stop for a while and reassess and reevaluate what you want and what you need. It’s called being human and it’s what I needed to do. After I went through this difficulty, I felt that when I did eventually get to a point where we did qualify for a loan with a lower interest-rate, I appreciated it more.

In part seven of Finding My Home, I'll talk about how we decided to actually plan out how we were going to pay for our home in detail, what went in the plan, why we made the choices we did, and how we put that plan into action so as to allow us to secure a higher interest rate on a home loan.