Escrow Agreement For Working Capital This Agreement - Hud: Fill & Download for Free

Maybe. To begin with here's my obligatory cute kitteh picture from my photos:Note: I'm typing this on a “smart" phone. Please excuse any errata. If you see errata which aren't stylistic intentionally misspelled words and can't excuse them, you're welcome to submit an edit suggestion. For anything else my rule is Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies in my thread. Fair Warning. I'm an Aspie and I tell the truth with the whole truth no matter who it annoys.This is the only truthful answer you're going to get here, and you're going to get it in the form of a shaggy dog story with lots of history because those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.I'm sorry. Truly and deeply sorry. Yes I’m mean, but I promise you it’s worth the education because this is the story of how I bought a home for $167,000 UNDER value.As things sit right now, I owe about $80k with a valuation of over $300k and a PITI payment of under $1k. I also have over half my monthly payment going to pay down principal which means that if all goes to plan I'll be holding my very own mortgage burning party in about 8 years. Y'all will be invited. I expect a blowout that will make a proper Tennessee Hills shivaree look weak.Some of this is due to a confluence of factors and timing, but some of it is me being a Very Particular Sort of Asshole. If you can buy, then buy. With Wall Street being the rigged and theiving game of Three Card Monte Carlo that it is, owning property is the only chance we ordinary folks will ever see.Before we go on here's a bit of mood music I think fits the situationDoubt me if you will, but this video below absolutely IS, demonstrably, how the entirety of Wall Street plays the investment game. The second you start getting confident and dropping big money on the table they change the rules on you and TAKE it. For any doubters please see the ’80s S&L fraud, the ’95 Dot Com crash, and the 2006 fraud in home loans with their REIT and fraudulently rated Reverse Derivatives crap which NOT ONE BANKER EVER WENT TO PRISON FOR.In 2007 I met up with my then girlfriend who was recently divorced and living in the house which she and her ex had bought together. In 2008 the economy was tanked and I moved in with her to help cover the bills. I had work she had a hobby type business which until then had covered her bills. She was in foreclosure due to the divorce and I wasn't in a position to be able to cover her house payment, but I could cover the other bills and our living expenses.. so I did. And life was good.As an aside, I’m on the Asperger’s Spectrum and in some ways I am a bit of an asswhole who once had a Navy Drill Instructor tell me (while laughing hard) that I “Have a very nice Full Rolling Bellow.” If y'all spot this phrase in my writing that's where it came from.If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons you’ll identify me as the Chaotic Good Mage and this will come into play later. I’m also a Tennessee Hill Country boy, of Norwegian extraction, and a Navy Veteran among other attributes. Suffice to say that from many folks’ perspective I’m an odd critter, slightly left of center, who doesn’t necessarily play by the rules of society. Some find that offensive; many find it entertaining. I’ll let you decide. That is to say that I am a Very Particular Type of Asshole.;}So GF and I were having ourselves a nice little life together in 2008 and long about 2009 she started getting nasty letters from the bank about the unpaid mortgage. Since I wasn’t anywhere on the paperwork I wasn’t worried but she didn’t have a way to pay the mortgage, nor any easy way for the bank to enforce against her, I wasn’t particularly worried. I was beginning to ponder buying a house at that point any way.Now I learned about buying houses from my dad and my grandfather who are both engineers of various sorts. The rules I learned were strictly Old School and since both men had held mortgage burning parties, I’m going to listen to them over anyone else… especially any banker with a vested interest in seeing me fail (I’ll get to this in a bit but it speaks directly to my experience throughout this process)Here’s those rules:Your total payment including Principal, Interest, Taxes and Insurance (PITI) should not exceed 25% of your gross income or 33% of your net income. Yea’ the bankers and mortgage brokers will tell you that you can afford more, but they AIN’T working for you or your best interests. Ever. They’re working for THEIR commission in their wallets and whether you make it long term or not woun’t chap their hide one little bit. OTOH, I have nothing to gain and am interested in seeing as many of my fellow citizens own homes sucessfully as is possible.Your minimum payment isn’t what the banks’ monthly statement says. Your minimum payment is whatever the PITI payment is PLUS $100 minimum.If there’s any way at all for you to get a V.A. Loan, a USDA loan, or a HUD loan by all means DO IT!! There are legally mandated protections in those loan programs which aren’t available in normal brokered bank loans, and they absolutely will save you endless grief. I have a VA loan. Especially if youre in a rural or semirural area the USDA loan program can be an outstanding loan. The VA loan, if you can get it, is the best of the best.The 25% of gross and 33% of net income limits should be considered hard maximums regardless of the time frame of the loan you’re considering. Here’s the problem.. When things are good 33% of Gross isn’t an issue and even 40% of Gross can work IF things are good. The problem is that life rarely stays good for the 15 or 30 years you’re going to be paying on this loan AND if you figure wrong youre screwed because default isn’t just “hand the car back” it includes destroying your credit rating while losing your home, and that means you are going to have a tough time even being able to rent an apartment. Since we no longer have any meaningful bankruptcy protection unless your completely destitute (Thanks Clinton!) you really cant afford to mess this up.. Which means you need to be very conservative in what you think you can afford. This way when (not if, WHEN) your income does tank youll at least have half a chance to make it and keep the house. If you listen to the “new” standards you won’t get that chance.Get pre-approved in full. Your pre-approval letter should state the maximimum loan size, an interest rate, and the type of loan. Know tha sellers often get all starry eyed when they’re looking at approval letters and so your approval letter shouldn’t show a number much higher than your offer price. In any case if the approval amaount is more than about $5k above the offer it goes with, I’d ask the bank loaning yu the money to rewrite the letter so it matches the offer.If you are able to get approved for one of those loans I listed above do not, under any circumstances, surrender it for a standard Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac bank loan. You may well need to fight for it as most banks would rather lose your business than deal with the restrictions written into these loans. If for no other reason than the bank wants to force you into one of their products to keep all that interest and those fees in house. Those restrictions are critical, especially in these days of the Universal Default BS so many banks are pulling.Do not ever sign any legal document without reading it over thoroughly and understanding everything including what defines a “default” and how a default can be cured. If you see ANY indication of what’s called a Universal Default Clause walk T.F. away.When you go looking for a real estate agent get what’s called a Buyer/Broker Agreement. DO NOT hire a real estate agent without one. The reason for this is that under the laws of most states the real estate agent, by default, is legally obligated to work for the SELLER of a property. Whit a Buyer/Broker Agreement that legal fiduciary duty is shifted to the BUYER. As a buyer you need this.During the life of your mortgage you NEVER, EVER, under any circumstances refinance; unless that refi will get you at least 3 percentage points better in the rate. This is because of how mortgage amortization works. In the beginning of a mortgage of every $100 in payment only 15% to 20% goes to pay down the money you borrowed. The rest goes straight into some bankers pocket to buy them a yacht or a 4th house. As th ed mortgage ages, that rate improves and at about year 15 on a 30 year loan every $100 in mortgage payment puts $40 on paying the base amount down. The banks have a vested interest in having you pay as high a percentage of each payment to interest as possible, so they always want you to refinance. It also opens you to any new shenanigans they've come up with (like the Universal Default bull crap they're using now).Onward.. So after 2 years of living the Good Life with the GF in her being foreclosed house, I was ready to buy and had found a bank owned foreclosure I wanted, and I went to get pre-approved for a loan. The bank, based upon my income, credit, and living expenses, gave me an approval for $355K. My rules above based upon PITI being 25% of gross said I should be at about $250k at the maximum. I wanted to be at half that so when these bastards blew up our economy again, I wouldn't have to care. I've been through 4 of these events now. The rate for that time was good, and it was a VA loan so I accepted and went shopping.This was an interesting process. very interesting. In case you’re wondering how we stayed in the Girl Friends’ house for 2 years without paying, recall that in 2006 the housing bubble which banks had created over the prior two decades “burst.” In reality they blew it up for fun and profit, but that’s a whole other story (which I'll address in a bit).. She did try to get help under Obama’s fake “relief” program but the law had no teeth to force banks to allow any reductions in rate or capital, and I worked with several different agencies to no avail. In fact, out of the 30 some folks I tried to get help for with this gaslit unicorn smoke “relief” program, I know of one who actually got any help at all. The rest got squat. Here’s why:The reason we got to stay is that the banks were so swamped with foreclosure paperwork that she got missed for those nearly three years as if the paperwork had dropped into a black hole.We regarded this as a Good Thing and as a bit of just come uppance.So I had my approval for my VA loan, a bit of savings, and the house I wanted to buy within my identified price range in hand. At this point the process should have been simple, right? Nope!Despite the fact that I had dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s, it was a bank owned repossession, in the midst of a financial fire storm created by the national banks and Wall Street for fun and profit. SMDH asshats and thieves. Here’s the explainer of this fraud they pulled:For the younger folks here’s a slightly different explainer:So I have everything in place, all my ducks are in a row, and they’re all quacking happily. It's now mid 2010 and the housing market is crashing HARD and losing about 8% per month in price. Some of the bank owned properties were losing 10% per month in value simply because there was so much on the market. My agent and I go look at several houses I’ve identified and I found the place I’m in now. The Asking price from Bank of Asshats was $269k and I offered $269K.B of A replied that they “needed” another $10K above Asking to close the deal and I replied that I had offered Asking, and that no one else had even looked at the place in the year prior.. Note: THIS is why you need a Buyer/Broker Agreement. Without that, Peter (my agent), would not have been able to legally tell me this handy little fact, and having all those handy little facts can be very useful in any negotiation. I told B of A to keep it, and didn’t tell them I’d just put in an offer at whatever the Ask was a month from now because the market was dropping like an FA-18 jet with the engine flamed out…As we say in the Navy.. All the glide path of a rock.The next month the asking price dropped to $229k and we put in another offer at (you guessed it) $229K. Band of Asshats NTSA replied that they needed an extra $20K above Ask and they needed me to fillout a loan application with them.. meaning that they didn't like my VA loan with all those protections for me because “they were hard to work with” (which they weren't). I replied that if they had a VA Compliant loan (they didn’t) I was willing to consider financing with them (I wasn’t because of prior run ins with their entrenched corporate asshattery). They replied that they didn’t have a VA Compliant loan and that I would just have to accept a straight Fannie Mae Conforming loan… which offered none of the protections of a VA Loan and required a minimum 20% down plus an extra $8k in in paperwork fees to the bank..Nope! Keep it.I continued to look a other places and found a few I didn’t like as much but dropped offers on them with similar turd stained results.. in a market losing over 8% value per month because there was a glut in the market and even institutional investors weren’t buying.This process continued through 8 or 10 different offers over 6 months, and I kept coming back to that first house I’d identified, until I found that video on the Indy Mac Boys deal I linked above. Then I got MAD. Laughing Mad.If you ever see someone who's laughing mad, kids, the best thing to do is treat them as you would an angry boar.. Load up the largest round you've got handy and back away slowly to the nearest tree.. then climb to the top of that tree just as quick as you can.The next to last offer was also at Asking, as had been all my offers, even though Peter my agent suggested offering above ask “Just to make these F-wits happy.” We were both beginning to feel a bit like we were trapped in a low grade redux of Groundhog Day because we’d put in an offer at Ask in a market dropping like the proverbial stone off a cliff, and we kept getting the same BS of “Well we just need a bit more from you!” Once I found that Indy Mac Boys video, I did a bunch of research and found out that these dirty thieving SOB bankers had not only tanked the market by putting fraudulently rated loans into these REIT investments and the fraudulently rating those as AA and AAA investments; they had also sold that fraudulently rated and designed to crash and burn crap into all of our Employee Retirement Programs.. whichis why they crashedand burned too. RICO the bastards is what SHOULD have happened. What actually happened is Obama and his banker lap dog Holder screamed a bunch of lies about how these thieves and frauds were “Too Big To Fail!”Note 2: Yes, Shrub (Bush Jr.) Started that “Too Big To Fail!” lie AND that lying, erudite, SOB Obama picked it up and ran with it to the finish line like some kind of twisted relay race.Once I’m mad, I become testy. I still wanted this house but my game plan changed and part of that change was the result of having a Buyers Broker rather than just dealing with any old Real Estate agent. Peter filled me in on the process of Sheriff’s Sales which is the final step in clearing a title on a foreclosed home in Oregon… and I pondered.. I got mad and my Aspergers kicked in so I decided to go Full Bugs Bunny in the negotiations as I felt that would serve my Chaotic Good psyche best even if I didn’t get this house.The last offer I made was at $108k.. just about $165k below my first offer 8 months prior. I reconfirmed my VA Loan 3 times in that period as well.. at a slightly lower rate each time.Blathering Asshats, NTSA Bank, of course, came back with their now standard “Well, we need to have an extra $20k” crap because they’re greedy amoral thieves and that’s just what they do. I counter offered That in light of the market dropping 8% per month the past year, I was now willing to offer $104k AND B of A pays all closing costs.. including all inspections.Peter got a call shortly there after from a very confused young negotiator gal at B of A asking if she could talk to me directly. I said I was fine with that and she was given my number.Negotiator Gal calls me up and asked if there was a typo in the new offer because apparently she thought my tactics weren’t fair to the bank.I was still laughing mad at this point. for those of you who don’t know what this means, it’s being so mad that if I can’t blatantly point and laugh at something, there’s a better than fair chance I’ll be going to prison in very short order. Folks.. remember that wolves often smile at you right before they take your arm off.I gently explained the history of my offers on this house and the $165k drop in asking prices over the months and that I was done playing here and now I’m out for blood. I think I may have mentioned boar, wolves, and big snapping turtles.Negotiator Gal turned on her charm and repeated that they needed to have an extra $20k, to which I demurred while laughing hard. She became confused and asked me whether I really wanted the house and, still giggling like an idiot, I gently explained that I had already put in offers well above the current ask and that I was now Officially fed T.F. up with their shenanigans, and didn’t really care a bit how this negotiation worked out because I has a Plan! She asked me what my plan was and I explained that this was, based on their actions, an adversarial situation, and as such I wouldn’t be showing my cards until it was time to Call the table. I then asked her if we could come to an agreement, would she be the one approving that agreement, or would she need to consult someone else for the final approval?She replied that the deal would need to go through at least three levels of approval before it could be inked and printed.Note that I’m still laughing mad at this point, but I had my answer and I had the bit firmly in my teeth now because I knew my next step if this deal fell through was that the property would be at a Sheriff’s Sale on the courthouse steps and I had the financing to close it there with just a few phone calls to initiate the wire transfer.Poor gal.. she never saw it coming.I asked her to put me through to the person who had the final approval on these deals because I was tired of playing their silly games and wanted to either close this now, or be done with them entirely. She did put me through (probably violating some B of A policy) and after a 15 minute hold got this stuffed shirt bank VP high muckey muck who promptly starts bloviating at me about “This just isn’t how WE at Blundering Asshats Bank NTSA DO things!”I replied that I was at the point where I really didn’t care how they DiD tHiNgs any longer, and that I’d tried for months to do things their way, and was now done playing nice. he spluttered himself to a stop and asked me what I meant by that, and I recounted the chain of events from that first offer at $269k to this offer at $104k with the bank paying all closing costs. He sat silent as I talked and only interupted once or twice to ask a few details.When I got done MISTER VP offered that we could go back to the $108k offer and the bank might consider paying closing, but wouldn’t be paying any inspections.My tone became that of a Navy DI explaining something very simple to a complete idiot…I answered that this was not how this was going to play out and that he really needed to listen closely if he valued his career in banking. Mister VP became upset by my tone and I told him to either shut up and listen closely of start packing his office because my next move would be a letter to each Board Member of B of A with a CC to the New York Times, The San Jose Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington post laying out in gory detail the shenanigans I’d experienced and asking each Board Member to explain to me how it was that, during a market which was tanking at over 8% per month, they thought it was okay to walk away from the $165k I had put on the table with my original offer. As I laid this out i could hear Mr. VP’s sphincter puckering over the phone line..He tried to stop me once and I started listing off the names of the board members which seemed to shut him up quickly.I then said that I’d mention him by name in the letter and that my next offer, if this one didn’t close, would be at the court house steps for $84k and at that point I would cheerfully pay for any needed inspections. Then the knives came out as I asked MISTER VP exactly what those board members might think of him tanking a deal which could have netted the bank $165k more than my current offer and $20k more than my $84k purchase on the court house steps if this deal fell through because of his obdurate gamesmanship.Mr. VP hesitated and asked me a few questions about the details here and there, which I politely filled him in on and I said that I was calling their bluff. He asked how much time he had and I said “Wall suh, the offer in front of yall expires at 17:00 tomorrow, so I’d estimate y’all got about 24 hours to figure out how you’re gonna play this hand. I’ve got my letters written and all I need to do is print them and mail them return reciept. I closed the conversation by hanging up without so much as a GFY, and called Peter to fill him in on the new game plan.Peter was laughing, and I think he laughed all night long on that conversation because this really, in any normal circumstance, just isn’t How Things Work.The next day Peter called me up at 17:15 or so asking what I wanted to do.. as he explained it he had just gotten a fax from B of A accepting my $104k offer and agreeing to pay all closing costs and inspection fees along with a photocopy of a check for repairs of the issues they already knew about which was about $1,800 or so.I told him to “Let the bastards SWEAT a bit and then we’ll send back our agreement to the acceptance at $104k".. This was an option because the fools had let the offer expire at 17:00 before faxing over their acceptance so the ball was firmly in my court. Had it been before 17:00 I wouldn’t have had a choice.. So he let them sweat until 18:00 and then faxed back my acceptance and renewal of offer.I closed escrow in the beginning of 2011.Shameless plug.. If you happen to be in BFE Central Oregon and need a really good, and dead honest Real Estate Agent go look up Peter Hatton and tell him I said howdy. This guy is truly the best of the best and he knows ALL the games that get played. He also truly likes his clients even when they're a Very Particular Sort of Asshole like myself.