House. Hunting. Adventures {HHA}

I wanted to give an update on our H.H.A being that this "break" is due to it. Our Realtor told us about this program that our city offers to first time home owners. The program is called First Time Home Owner Program. What the program offers is: You have to meet a certain income criteria for however many people are in the household. If you qualify, the city program will provide you with 17% of the down payment for your home, and you {the home owner} have to come up with the other 3%.

The first person on the program list to contact was a lady named Lisa. Over the telephone her and I discussed my household income. Well needless to say, my husband and  I were about $500 over the average income needed for two people to qualify for the program. Now since I was "guestimating" what our income was, she told me to call again when I had some pay stubs and income tax papers in hand.

I relay the news via email back to the Realtor. Now at this point my frustration level on a scale from 1 to 5, was on a level 2. The Realtor let me know not to worry she had someone else from the program for us to discuss things with. Our next person of contact was Craig. Our Realtor had said that Craig was some kind of financial person for the program. I believe I called Craig on a Monday, three days went by and I did not hear from him yet. Wednesday morning I call him and leave him a message, basically saying second time I've called you in three days, leaving another message. He called the next day and spoke to husband. On the phone they discussed about pulling our credit scores and seeing if they are good enough to help us get into a loan. {Now my husband and I know our credit is not the greatest} Craig calls my husband back telling him that our credit did not qualify us and that we should be getting a detailed letter in the mail.

Frustration level now at 3, I contact our Realtor and let her know what's going on. Sounding a little frustrated herself she says lets wait for this detailed letter to come and see where we can go from there. Realtor mentioned to us that Craig should have went over with us what on our credit we should fix right away so that we can re-do this process. According to her that is his job! So my husband and I get the letter in the mail like Craig said we would. Opened letter in hand, there was absolutely no kind of detail on the letter, other then our credit was ran by so and so. No credit score, no fix this and this, NOTHING.

By this point we are at level 4 frustration. I contact the Realtor by a not so nice email and let her know about the no detailed letter. She is now as frustrated as I am that these people are not giving me answers that I need. I let her know that if we have to contact Craig one more time that we would pass on the offer. Well she apologized but then had us going back to contact person number 1, Lisa. Our Realtor told us to expect a phone call from Lisa within the week, that she had spoke to her and told her what was going on. Well the week went by and Lisa never called. Realtor asked, I told her no and that was that. We later received some kind of letter in the mail from Lisa, that I have yet to read since it got to us around the time my aunt passed away.

Beyond frustrated we did not expect all of the above to happen to us. Hell we expected to get approved right away and be in a new house within 2-3 months. We are about $10,000 dollars in debt and were told as soon as we start fixing it we may be able to qualify to some part of the program. Let's face it, we don't have $10,000 laying around anywhere. So now we have decided to move into a bigger apartment where we are only pay about $100-$125 more in rent. Save money to fix our credit, and money to go back to the RE. I believe that we can fix our credit in about 1yr and half.