Mortgaged

We met with the solicitor this morning to sign our lives away. That's right: we signed the loan documents from the bank.

When we bought our house in Phoenix, signing the loan documents was a major ordeal. There were bank documents and title company documents and escrow company documents. We must have signed our names 147 times. It took hours. They actually brought us bottled water to help us through it.

This morning was nothing like that. We arrived at our solicitor's office at 8:30. We signed and initialed 3 documents. Just 17 minutes later, we were out the door again. Unbelievable!

The next step is a walk through, which we're trying to schedule for the weekend before we close. Then on settlement day (1st February), our bank will deposit the money into our solicitor's trust account, and the solicitor will transfer the money to the sellers' solicitor's account. Once the money has been transferred, we can get the keys and the house is ours. Pretty simple, really.

We do find it a little strange that the bank has never actually verified that we have jobs or assets. The bank has agreed to loan us a fairly substantial sum of money based only on our word that we will pay them back. In today's financial climate, we're not sure we would have so readily trusted us. Maybe that's just the New Zealand way...