We’ve got good news and bad news.
Work still hasn’t started on our house, and we’ve run into a few more hurdles. The financing we were planning on getting from the HELP loan has turned problematic; basically, we learned that for the purposes of this loan, the bank calculates annual household salary by adding up our gross pay over the last 52 weeks. We were hoping they were going to average this year’s pay with last year’s, or something similar, which would put us squarely within income limits. But by doing it this way, the total they’ll come up with will include all the overtime Nick put in around Christmas and during his first weeks at Apple, which will be more than just his base salary, which means that our combined income would be more than the upper income limit for a household of three. So, the bad news is that we make too much money to qualify for the HELP low-interest loan.
The good news is that SOMEONE thinks we make too much money. Never though I’d hear those words!
Seriously though, Nick and I were in a deep funk yesterday, with the reality of what we were doing weighing on us, heavily. Nick might have even thrown it out there: did we make a mistake in buying the house? I maintain that we did not. We are getting a cute little house that is affordable and in our desired neighborhood. When the renovation is done, it will be great. We just have to keep the long view. The eye on the prize, as they say.
And there is good news. Bangor Savings Bank has something called the High Performance Home Loan. Like the HELP loan, this is also a loan made to homeowners looking to make energy-efficient improvements. But, it requires a lot less supporting documentation and is less stringent than the HELP loan, in some ways. Of course, the interest rate is also double the HELP loan, but it’s still lower than a regular consumer loan. We just have to get Ben to submit a work plan, and they base the loan amount on that. This is a huge relief, because without the loan, we’d be living in a shell of a house with no walls or insulation. Now we can insulate the walls, the previously uninsulated porch, and maybe even get ourselves a new front door!
I’m not even sure how I found out about this loan. I guess that’s one of the benefits of having OCGD (obsessive-compulsive Googling disorder). If you just click enough links, you’ll eventually find out about these things.
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