The best mortgage lender ever!

I don't usually do endorsements (don't want to sully the purity of my blog) but I just have to rave about Navy Federal Credit Union (thanks Dad, for being in the Marines!) We just got a call today from our loan processor to tell us that we were getting a rebate from NFCU for taking out our home loan with them. Now, mind you, this is a $70,000 loan, not very big potatoes, and they charged us a grand total of $421 to process the loan (and that included $350 for an appraisal), but they issued us a $2,000 rebate!!

Needless to say, I'm feeling very warm and fuzzy towards them right now. In fact, I'm willing to overlook the two returned check fees they charged me this month in the midst of all the moving chaos.

Closing went well -- we actually met our home seller, Kate. That's how you do it here in friendly Colorado. No escrow companies here, the title company handles the close. So Kate, our vivacious young title agent Candace, and our respective real estate agents sat down at a big table and signed documents for 45 minutes. I was really impressed when Candace explained how title insurance worked using our actual neighbors as examples. That admiration dissipated when Candace confessed that she and Kate were friends and that she had actually helped Kate remodel the house when she first bought it.

Kate was a young woman who seemed both sad and relieved to be done with the house. She'd bought it with a "no-good" ex and put a ton of work into it, ripping off plastic wallpaper and taking down mirrored wall panels, scraping popcorn and removing weird faux ceiling beams. I had a much greater appreciation for all she'd done, after realizing that I probably wouldn't have bought the house in its original state. (Previously, I'd been noticing only the work that still needed to be done -- the bathroom that needs a remodel, the peeling kitchen countertops and the worn carpeting.)

She said we had wonderful neighbors, which I was glad to hear, and reccomended a potential babysitter across the street from us. And, once all the paperwork was signed, she said, "now I can tell you, let the water run in the upstairs bathtub on the coldest nights of the year or the pipe freezes and you can't use it until it warms up again." I thought it was so funny that she was worried we'd back out of the sale if we knew that in advance.

It was quite nice to actually meet the person who lived her before us. It seems so strange to turn a home over to someone else sight unseen. Steve and I wrote out a letter to our buyer in Murrieta, explaining the various apple trees and grape vines in the garden and how to care for them, when we mailed her the mailbox keys we'd accidentally taken with us. She kindly sent us 9 pounds of mail that hadn't been forwarded, but without even a note. Which of course convinced me that she's mad at us because we couldn't get all the dog pee smell out of the upstairs carpet before we left. (sigh.)

What an interesting and fraught process buying and selling a house is....