Hard Sell

Okay, so our regular readers will know that we’ve been in the market for refinancing our current ARM mortgage for was feels like forever. We starting thinking about it before our wedding in July, but didn’t have time to deal then. Now we’ve seriously been in the market for the last two months.

We first went to several of the loan officers that we had worked with in the past, to see what they were willing to offer. We also checked out several online lenders and ended up narrowing the selection down to two local lenders. We did our math and ran the mortgage comparisons. We ended up going with the lender who was waiving all fees because it won out in the long run by a hair over the other lender.

Then we faced several discrepencies on the loan materials, and finally the lender coming back with basically a whole other package than we first started out with.

Over the weekend we started looking at online lenders again and now I’m plagued by ten calls a day from lenders who are panting over a live body.

Despite all the hassle of the process, it still pays to shop around. It might be a pain in the neck now, but it is worth it in the long run.

• Do your homework, or they’ll stick it to you.
• Run the calculators to double check what the best deal is (what seems like a small difference can be huge in the long run).
• Be patient in the process and firm in standing by what your aim is.
• Remember that you are the client in the process, paying a lot of money for what you want, not what someone else wants to sell you.
• It’s as if mortgage sale people think that they are good enough to have you walk into the showroom wanting a VW bug and leave with a VW bug, but at the price of a Mercedes, and hope you don’t notice that you just got screwed.
• Stick with it! (That’s what I tell myself these days anyway!)

Best,

Miel