13 August 2010

They want the solicitor’s details

When the agent rang to say our offer had been accepted she also asked for my solicitor’s contact information. What solicitor?  Oops, was I supposed to have one already.  I agreed to forward the information, but until I had finance organised I quietly ignored this request.

Within a remarkably short time, the vendor’s agent rang again asking me to provide details of my solicitor, and in the days following (or was it weeks) I was continually asked for this information.

I was dragging my feet. I didn’t want to proceed until my finances had been worked out. It was getting embarrassing.  But there was no way anyone was going to find out my real situation.

Unhappy with the response from my current lender, I was now shopping for a home loan elsewhere. I should have done all of this a lot earlier. I was beginning to get a bit anxious.

As a first step in financing the new property I scanned the web for a suitable lender. There are so many banks and other financial institutions that the task of filtering them becomes overwhelming. There are even web sites that do the filtering for you.

If you search using the phrase “home loan comparison” you get almost two million results. The phrase “home loan guide” returns 26,000 results.  And the last thing I wanted was it to be presented with was tons of pictures of smiling people on web pages with them sipping wine or carrying meaningless symbols when you are feeling stressed.

It gets confusing. Information overload. In the end, I opted to ignore the pretty web sites with pictures of happy smiling faces in favour of talking to people I knew seeking their experiences. This doesn’t say much for my web based solution.  I had already checked out the organisation that was currently financing my home, and that had ended abruptly. The search continues.

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