Time to Celebrate? Maybe Not.

We are in escrow!  That should be great news, right?  Well it might be, and it might not be.  To understand just how emotionally invested we are in closing on a home I'll have to give you a little background.

As a kid I moved a lot.  I only had my own room for a very short period of time when I was 4.  After that I was sharing a room with my mother that she rented from someone else.  Living in a home with other people can be dangerous.  It was for me.  All I ever wanted was to make sure that my kids grew up in a home that only contained our own family.  Renting has been our only choice for the past 13 years.  Renting a place and not being able to save enough money for our own house. 

Our first attempt at home buying was in 2000.  We made enough money.  We had a small and modest savings.  We could afford it, but our credit was bad.  My mom said she'd buy it in her name and in a few years when our credit improved we would "buy" it from her for the amount of the mortgage.  Just when we hear that the seller accepted our offer, my mother backed out. 

We decided to wait and work on our credit.  We did great!  But in 2002 the home prices started outpacing our income.  We both changed jobs where our pay was much better, but the prices kept outpacing us.  Being in the mortgage industry I knew that we could buy a home, but the payment was beyond my comfort level.  I knew it wasn't a good idea for us financially.  It wasn't easy to stave off my husbands demands to buy a home.  But even that early in I knew that it was a house of cards.

In 05 I took maternity leave.  My job disappeared while I was changing diapers and playing home maker.  Our nest egg began to deflate as we adjusted to living life without my salary and bonuses.  Our income now cut in half, the housing market in shambles, rasing 5 kids, 2 of which weren't ours, we put our dreams of buying a house in the near future on the back burner.

I've worked off and on since 2007.  Both my husband and I are self employed.  His job as a contractor has been unaffected by the housing market.  My job as a loan processor wasn't so lucky.  Loans for the self employed are much harder to qualify for.  Every dollar that we write off in our taxes is a dollar less in our income.  Even though we can quite easily pay 1,500 a month in rent we barely qualify for a 500 mortgage payment.

Here we are in 2010.  We've been seriously, actively looking for a home for about 8 months now.  We have found a city that is close enough to my husbands customers, and has nice, newer homes.  We have submitted dozens of offers, the most recent on a short sale.  Our offer is 5k below asking and 10k below market value and was the max we qualified for.  Our offer was accepted by the bank.  I shrieked! I jumped for joy!  I called my husband and celebrated!  My realtor emailed me transfer disclosures we needed to sign, and that is when it happened. 

It was the word I looked for when checking listings.  It was the word that most people don't even know about.  Mello Roos.  The word that should have been in the listing and was not.  Mello Roos is a special property tax that not all properties have.  Some new constructions have it, and some do not.  This special property tax amounts to $150 a month.  Not to mention the other shocker I found while going through the 36 pages of nonsense most buyers cant figure out.  A notice about receiving a copy of the CC&R's.  No CC&R's could be found, no notice on how much the HOA fee is, if there is one.  The mello roos is enough to kill our deal though, even if the CC&R notice was a  mistake.

Even though I'm a loan processor I'm not working on my own loan.  I'd rather have someone else do all the work and deal with my wrath if they mess up.  I discussed the mello roos with the loan officer who made the same "oh no" sigh I did.  He's looking into it on his end, but this could be the thing that kills our chance at this house.