Ok I began looking at home loans, as you do when you finally begin making enough money, your real estate agent becomes overly intrusive and you’re sure it’s a compulsive disorder, you hate the dull white painted walls and cheap fixes the owner made etc. Anyway, getting pre-approval on a loan and dealing with the process should be a quick and simple thing for a bright woman with excellent credit, a good deposit, no dependants and a great income… What more is there?
First Attempt
The first bank which was recommended, was C_________th Bank. Spoke to an efficient woman, named Ivy, who assured me everything looked wonderful and gave me ecstatic numbers and let’s face it unrealistic repayment rates for the top price they were willing to go to, but that was to be expected from a bank.
I get off the phone, feeling quite excited. Then the emails started…
I don’t know if C_________th Bank outsourced their loan assistants but each of these people who emailed me on the original woman’s behalf, had names which were very obviously not within the same country or for that matter, maybe, planet. Here are a few I got –
“Hi Maxine,
I work in Ivy’s team and am assisting you with your loan. You have submitted everything online and that has caused a mistake and duplicated your account so you’ll need to close one of them at your closest branch. We’ll call you with more information.
Kind regards,
Shawarma tahini Lahmacun“
Was not named after Turkish food but similar to the feeling you get when visiting a new restaurant and can’t pronounce the names on the menu, so you sheepishly ask if they have chips…
5 missed calls at 2 am later…
“Hi Maxine,
We tried to call you to talk about your loan but were unable to reach you. I’m part of Ivy’s team. Can you fill in the two other forms on the app and tell us the colour of your underwear by weekday?
Kind regards,
Long name with a lot of guttural sounds“
Ok they did not ask for my underwear colour, but they were asking questions that anyone would call a bit overly confidential and of no use for a loan application. Seemed a bit nosey. I eventually called the bank to confirm these were not spam/some identity theft scam. Was assured that it was Australia based and it was the correct location and that my information was safe. They also asked for the names of the “staff” assisting me and I could tell by the long silences that they may have thought I was being rude/racist by my ill attempt to say the long foreign names and gave up trying to spell them to the “Australian” on the other end of the phone…
“Hi Maxine,
I’m part of Ivy’s team, the form you filled in is out of date. Please fill in the new one and get two witnesses to watch you sign it, again.
Kind regards,
I swear this name had clicks in it! It was like they had taken all the consonances and then forgotten to put them in any order! At this stage, I was sure that they were playing a prank on me.”
The form which was out of date had just been changed the day after they had sent me the email, and I had been messed around enough by this stage. I decided to let the whole thing go as an experience and to try again the next month with a different place.
I am still getting emails from Ivy’s team and feel like they might get a bit lonely with only a hanging vine to feel connected to random Australians looking for mortgages?
Second Attempt
My second attempt was actually me trying to make it easier on myself. I mean, we only hear good things about using mortgage brokers to help with this huge financial decision. So A____e home loans was contacted after I found a property I was kinda interested in. They came up with the other side from the bank and made me sound like I couldn’t afford a loaf of bread. I kept telling them that as a first home buyer, I didn’t need to pay the additional huge fees for stamp duty and for some reason the government has an added bonus for themselves, which the call their administrative fee?
Now, I’m guessing that entering in the computerised system that a house has changed ownership is very complicated for the government at their fee cost? Not like we have software or people whom their soul job is to ensure the ownership of homes is correct etc. But they feel they need a slice of the huge amount of money a person is spending to start their lives, not like we pay huge council rates every year right? Oh, wait…
Sorry that was a different rant.
Anyway so talked to a person, late at night, which I’m starting to think loan agents might be some kind of vampire, anyone else suspect this? Loan amount agreed, asked me to fill in forms – yep, lots of forms and these guys unfortunately did not use the pdf editor that makes them able to be filled in on the computer. Which is a very smart way to allow people to fill in forms. It’s a small addin on Adobe and makes the forms easy to read and not have to make a poor schmuck use the valuable ink in their printer to print out a form which for some reason has been made into the most ink usage jumble in the history of man. Apparently blank space has to be filled in with bright and often hard to mix colours that the printer doesn’t understand and it prints the same colour as poo because it tried and failed to understand the hex code.
They then told me to select a loan options he would send through and they could get started on getting the loan approved and organised for when I made my offer.
Nice and simple right? First part certainly was. Anyway, selected the most reasonable loan type and get a call. Which was during the day, while I was working which was a suprise, so I’m thinking the loan agents are the vampires and maybe their assistants are like lures to trap people for them. This is a working theory that I’m developing, still need to find out why they make them so stupid… Maybe naivety so they wouldn’t realise their boss is a vampire? Anyway, this young woman was very sweet and trying to be helpful, but had the inexperienced and non-bitter edge to tell you she’s in her early twenties. These are the times you want the strict school ma’am who has lived a life of experience, helping you.
First off she told me, that I couldn’t select the loan I chose, and had to pick another one… I asked her why and after a couple of minutes of looking for an answer, she sighed and said that that one wasn’t meant to be in the choices I was sent. She says I got told this in my call with the other person and disagreed when I told her I hadn’t been told anything of the sort. Now the poor dear sounds flustered by a person asking a question, so I comply and ask which other ones they were, then after she thinks about it for another couple of minutes I select one of the two she then tells me. Now she tells me she’ll send me more forms from the bank. I fill in the forms and can’t login to the site as it asked me for a driver’s licence and I only have a State ID as I don’t drive. Now this confused the poor girl and she was obviously calling me outside of the office as I could hear crowds. She then said she would talk to them so I could submit my home loan pre-approval application by Monday. I was meant to make an offer on the Saturday, so was hoping to have a better assurance, but just shrugged my shoulders.
I get a call from the girl on the Monday and she tells me the loan I selected wasn’t available at that bank and I should have known that before selecting it. I, by this stage was rather annoyed at the young lady who I would probably get change back if I asked her for ‘a penny for her thoughts’! I told her that I wasn’t in a rush as I decided since she couldn’t guarantee the loan pre-approval on Friday, I had decided to not make an offer.
She then told me to hurry with the new forms so I could buy the house. I repeated myself and she again ignored me flatly. I basically at this stage was so fed up with the girl who when told to raise her IQ, she stood on a chair. I did the exact same thing we all do with bad dates and just ignored her phone calls.
She wasn’t quite ready to finish making mistakes and I really should have been more patient and allowed her to continue to her tragic end. But I got an email from her asking me where I was expecting to find an additional $47,000 for my loan. I looked at this and she had sent me someone else’s loan details! She had obviously mixed up records, which was not surprising from the poor brain dead woman, but I felt a moral responsibility to stop her before she commited a crime by sending out random people’s personal financial information. So, I very kindly explained her mistake to her in the email and warned her how risky that was.
I then get an email back, where she told me that it was my fault and that I obviously didn’t understand finance and asked again where I was apparently getting an additional 47 grand. She then offered to explain it to me? I gave up and just sent an email to the mortgage agent who I originally talked to asking that they close my loan application and remove my information from their systems.
Sorry, I have one more dumb joke before I end the second one – She was so dumb that she got rid of her high definition tv because she couldn’t understand the clarity 😂
Third Attempt
This one wasn’t so bad, but still made me feel slightly offended. So first weird thing was that the woman called me in the day… Not sure what this means for my vampire theory, but I was slightly surprised. She was lovely and had an experienced and warm personality which made me feel comfortable, unlike the young woman from A____e Home Loans.
She wasn’t invasive like the other two and only asked needed questions and didn’t need seventy two forms and fifty seven types of identification to start. So, I was impressed.
Sent two forms, one was a privacy information and the other was expenses report. Fair enough. I filled it in and sent them back. Got the email of the actual person which I had spoken to. Think the vampire ones must need to pass people along to their assistants because of daylight and maybe fear of being emailed a crucifix? Wasn’t sure how I had found a human one, but this seemed good.
I got a reply almost immediately and was a bit surprised. Not because of the efficiency, but that she seemed to think it was appropriate to question my expenses:
- “You should not be spending this much money on your pets. Explain the amount before I can process this.”
- “You forgot to put in your car registration cost and fuel. You need to put those in.”
For the first one, I do not think it was an excessive amount to spend on pets. I mean they have food, vet bills, cat litter, biscuits, toys etc and you don’t get any tax benefits, unlike those weird people who complain about having children. When they complain to me, I say to them, “Well at least one day they’ll grow up and look after themselves and if you’re lucky, you!” No matter how much I love my cats I highly doubt that they would be of much help if I needed to be rescued. I can picture them staring at me, lying on the floor with a broken leg and wondering why I hadn’t yet filled their food bowl…
Second question made me wonder how it couldn’t occur to her, that maybe, some weird abnormality with tectonic plates shifting and planets aligning, may, in this vast universe allow a woman not to own a car? I do know this might be weird that I somehow am applying for a home loan and don’t own a motor vehicle, which is apparently a very odd thing they fail to consider. I’m wondering if there should be a seperate section to the forms which allows the applicant to explain why they don’t drive or have a car, as it seems a very hard to understand fact.
The second home loan application lady also had a very hard time understanding this phenomenon, though as we know, she was stupid, so kinda had an excuse maybe? I had to explain a few times to her over the phone.
“Just submit your driver’s licence,” – dumbbell
“I don’t have a driver’s licence, only a state id,” – me
“But you need a driver’s licence to own a car,” – dumbbell
“I don’t own a car,” – me
“Oh, well then just use your passport,” – dumbbell
“I don’t have a current passport, only a state id” – me
“I thought that was a driver’s licence,” – dumbbell
“No it’s the same shape being a card, but it does not give me the legal ability to drive a car, boat, bus or plane,” – me
“Are you getting a licence soon or should I call the bank to see if you can use other identification?” – dumbbell
“Sure, was just going to apply to be a pilot, shouldn’t take more than a week or so to get a licence right? You know what, maybe it might be quicker to see if I can become a helmsman on a submarine?” – me
“It’s alright they also apparently accept passports, that shouldn’t take that long to get?” – dumbbell
I remember one of the other two also argued with me that I wasn’t paying enough in medicine. I promised to make greater efforts to break more bones in future years!
Really think it’s pretty rude to argue with a person about their finances. The only profession that is legitimatly expected to do this is an account/financial planner.
I’m a pretty routine and stable person and if I say I spent this much money per year on something then I have no idea why I would lie about it? Do they think I am running a conspiracy and I actually don’t have pets and use that money to not pay off a loan faster to double the insane interest! Wow, what a criminal master mind I must be! Should have just told them to swap the pet and non-existent car expenses, so they feel more comfortable? Hopefully I will eventually find my loan in shining armour. Seeming the same possibility as a fairy tale at this stage…
Well I’ve had fun so far, will keep people updated on the whole Mortgage Brokers are generally vampires 2/3 times. I’m actually considering booking a meeting with one at a bank and wearing garlic perfume to test my theory. Would think that the crypt meeting room with a coffin in it, was a slight giveaway, but I’m guessing they might have explained it away e.g.
“Need to rest my poor back in a dark place through most of the day, so I can wake up in time for the American Stock Market,”
“My allergies are so severe that I can’t be around people who go to the Italian restaurant at lunch,”
“The mirror isn’t showing me because I wear a light refracting suit which changes the direction of the light,”
“My intern always had those bite marks on her neck and an iron deficiency. She told me that the chemist was drunk when piercing her ears and the iron deficiency is because she’s become a vegan. I keep telling her to eat more soy! Young people these days!”
Think this has become a bit of a mission now. I’m going to be the Van Helsing of mortgage brokers! Might need a crossbow. Wish me luck…
Maxine the Magnificent 