The Bus Driver Who Bought Her House
I had only heard about this from a friend whose son bought a place out past Ceresco. Most people think the farm credit is just for land and combines and cattle. But they make home loans too, for houses in the country and in small towns, as long as the town is under twenty five hundred people.
Hollis qualifies by about fourteen hundred.
The office was a low brick building with a pot of mums by the door. The woman at the front desk asked if I had an appointment. I said no, and that I was sorry, and that I had a question about a house loan and only twenty nine days.
She went and got Pam Kittle.
Pam was maybe fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a cardigan the color of oatmeal. She shook my hand and walked me back to a little office with a picture of a feedlot on the wall and a jar of butterscotch candy on the desk.
“Twenty nine days,” she said. “Tell me.”
I told her. The house, the price, Dale, the man from Omaha. I didn’t tell her what Dale had said about bus drivers. I didn’t want it to be the first thing she knew about me.
Pam asked for my pay stubs, my last two tax returns, my bank statements. I had brought all of it in a manila folder, because I am a person who brings the folder.
She read every page. She read slowly. At one point she took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes, and I thought, well, that’s that.
“Your income works,” she said finally. “Your debt is nearly nothing. Eighteen years paying rent on time, you said? To the same man?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you get a letter from him saying that?”
I thought about that. “I think he’d write it,” I said. “He’s not a bad man. He just doesn’t think I can do it.”
Pam put her glasses back on. “Thirty days is tight,” she said. “I won’t lie to you. Appraisal, title, underwriting, all of it. But it isn’t impossible. A house that’s a straight sale between two people who know each other, no realtor, no chain of buyers, that’s about as clean as it gets.”
Then she got out a calculator, and we did the numbers.
At eighty nine thousand, she said, she would want to see at least ten percent down from me. That was eight thousand nine hundred. Closing costs, the appraisal, title insurance, the county recording fee and my share of the property taxes would run about thirty two hundred more.
“So call it twelve thousand one hundred in hand at closing,” Pam said. “Plus I’d like to see you keep a little back for emergencies. Where’s it coming from?”
I told her about the 403(b).
Pam put the calculator down. “You understand what pulling that early costs?”
“Tell me anyway.”
“You’re under fifty nine and a half,” she said. “So anything you take out is taxed as income, federal and state, and then the government takes another ten percent on top as a penalty. Your plan may let you take a hardship withdrawal to buy your main home, but the penalty still applies. You’ll lose roughly a quarter of whatever you pull.”
“So to get twelve thousand four hundred,” I said, “I’d have to take out about seventeen.”