Nightmare on Mortgage street

When you say to people that you are buying a new house everyone is very happy for you and none the wiser about what is really involved.

Perhaps you have never bought a property before but I tell you now, it's a rollercoaster of a process and that's after you've signed the contract and you know it's yours!

With our current purchase we decided to keep our existing loan (called a substitution) and just let the bank extend it to buy the new place. Sounds simple? Ha, you would know it but for some reason noone seems to know how this process works least of all the lawyers working for the bank nor my broker who set this all up!!!

We got to 4pm on the day before settlement was due to occur only to find out that the bank couldn't access the money available in the existing loan. This meant of course that we had to somehow get this money to them. With the threat of a delayed settlement on the cards many frantic phone calls were made trying to sort out this mess.

The end of it involves myself hand delivering a cheque from the bank to the banks lawyers! What a crock. Luck I had taken the week off else it would have been a difficult situation.

The thing that really gets to me about this whole process is that for a settlement that was longer than usual it took to one day before settlement to discover this problem and only by accident. None of the parties that supposedly should have done this before told me that I would have to participate in the settlement. I cannot believe that they didn't know about this.

Lesson to be learned in the future, don't trust the people who's job it is to know these things. Pretend they are all idiots and double check everything. They are all making money out of this transaction they should be on the ball yet they are not.

I feel like a project manager, manging my own property settlement, perhaps theres an industry in that?