Once you know what they need to write your loan, call or email periodically to make sure they have everything. Between bank statements, tax returns and other documents, there are ample opportunities for items to go missing or be forgotten about until the last minute. Lenders sometimes ask for more information at the last minute – copies of a rental agreement, a canceled deposit check, the original hazard insurance payment – that can leave you scrambling and lead to closing delays.Įarly on, find out exactly what documents the lender needs to complete your file and write you loan. By the time your loan is at the top of the priority list, it might be too late to get that missing document in time. Without periodic calls from you and your real estate agent, who also has a vested interest in closing the deal on time, your file could easily fall to the bottom of the pile while the loan officer deals with more urgent loans. Understand that in a hot real estate buying or refinancing market, lenders can be inundated. When you set a closing date and communicate that with your lender, you probably assume they will let you know in plenty of time if there are problems with meeting that deadline. Problem: Mortgage delays and last-minute requests Double-check the loan and down payment amounts, interest rates, spellings and all personal information. If something seems odd or you just don’t understand it, this is the time to ask questions. The sooner you spot a problem the faster you can get it fixed and keep your closing on track. By law, you will get your Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure forms three days before closing. Go ahead and ask to see every piece of paperwork as far in advance as possible. Either way, it could cause a delay of hours or even days. It could be as simple as a misspelled name or transposed address number or as serious as an incorrect loan amount or missing pages. One of the most common closing problems is an error in documents. With that in mind, here are a few common closing problems as well as ways to prevent them. All of this means it’s more critical to you than it is to anyone else to get the deal completed on time, so it’s wise for you to stay on top of things. Your loan commitment has an expiration date and so does your escrow. You, however, have a moving truck scheduled and deadline to vacate your current home. It really isn’t an emergency in their world. If your closing gets pushed back a day, that just means they do it on Tuesday instead of Monday. But they are also human beings working on a lot of files, not just yours. These folks are professionals and they absolutely should know what they are doing. For closing to go off without a glitch, your closing officer, your lender or loan officer and your real estate agent have to work together to get everything in order and processed correctly. What happens at closing is the culmination of more than a month of gathering and preparing documents. But you can avoid closing problems and delays, or at lease minimize them, by understanding what might go wrong and monitoring it well ahead of your closing date.
Paperwork tedium will give way to terror if there’s an unexpected delay in financing or error in a title document. But when it comes to closing on a home, a surprise is almost never a good thing.
An unexpected bonus or a hotel upgrade can make your day. And each week going forward, through September, another wave of both paper checks and some additional waves of payments made by direct deposit will be sent out.Some surprises are great.
We’ve now moved into the paper check phase of the money disbursements, with the IRS set to mail out the next wave of paper checks (to people who did not provide the agency with their direct deposit banking information) on Thursday. That means the tax agency, at this point, is a little more than halfway through the task of sending out an estimated 150 million stimulus payments by the time this is all over - but the remaining checks won’t be sent out as quickly as those in the first waves.
Of course, the forthcoming checks themselves are just as extraordinary, in their own right, for reasons that include the size of the payments (up to $1,200 for individuals and $2,400 for married couples, plus $500 for each child) as well as how they came about - via an unprecedented $2.2 trillion piece of emergency stimulus legislation Congress passed at the end of March.Īs of the end of last week, the IRS had already sent out 88.1 million stimulus checks totaling some $157 billion so far. Image source: Charles Krupa/AP/Shutterstock