Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Anatomy of a Deal

Well, we closed the deal on our house last Friday, and of course it was not without hitches and glitches. The bottom line is that we regret even considering going with an ING DIRECT mortgage. Let me just say they are not for everyone, and certainly not for us. With only two weeks to close the deal, we were forced to jump through hoops every step of the way, and after our "mortgage specialist" assured us we had been approved, it seemed there was always another document to send. It was a nightmare, to be frank. It felt like we were begging for a mortgage. Just a horrible experience.

To may a long story short, we phoned our real estate agent Debbie Kolli at about 1 p.m. on Friday to devise a fallback plan. She made a call to Cindy Gutcher at ScotiaBank in Timmins, and the wheels were set in motion. Keep in mind, we were thinking our lawyer’s office would phone any minute to tell us ING had advanced our money. At 2 p.m., when our "mortgage specialist" hadn’t returned our latest phone call, we headed over to ScotiaBank. Cindy told us she phoned head office in Toronto and said they could get the money to us in two hours. Cindy, along with Jeannie Deadman, took our documents that we had already sent to ING two weeks earlier and reviewed them. Everything was in order. All they had to do was verify that Christine was returning to work on Monday. A quick call to her boss confirmed as much. All they needed was a pay stub from me, no letter of employment or notice of assessments were needed. While we were sitting in Jeannie’s office, our specialist from ING finally phoned back. It’s a long story, but basically they weren’t ready to give us our mortgage because they still needed an authorized person to write a letter stating that my contract was indeed going to be renewed. We told the guy we were moving on to another mortgage company. Man, was that sweet. It was so nice that ING didn’t get our business. And our mortgage rate was actually better with ScotiaBank!

Anyway, everything worked out in the end. ScotiaBank got us our money just before the deadline to register the title. The lesson learned: ING bad; ScotiaBank good.

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