It's so hard for me to write about this time in our journey. Everything was a mess. Everything was stressful. To be honest, it still is.
What an almighty mess. We were informed on closing day that our buyers lending fell through. Even though he was cleared by his lender, and the appraisal went well, the mortgage insurance company decided they wanted to do an in office appraisal on the house and decided not to insure it more than about $60k less.
Of course, everything happened last minute, and our buyer ended up scrambling to find a new lender. Our realtors (and the buyers realtors) had NEVER seen or heard of such a thing EVER happening. So of course it would happen to us, because why not.
We came to a pause for a moment. Our buyer desperately needed our home, he was now officially homeless. But at the same time, our situation had changed as well. We COULD cancel the whole deal and keep the house in case her appeal was denied.
We didn't pause very long, however, because I already knew there was no way that I wanted to live in the suburbs of DC alone with the kids, even if we ended up being denied the appeal. So....we gave him a week to figure out his lending situation.
He had already found a lending company that said they could get him approved and closed on the house in about a week and a half, and they did their mortgage insurance in house, so once the appraisal was done, it would be good. So we agreed to continue the contract.
Of course......that meant another appraisal.
Meanwhile, we got the paperwork for EFMP filled out with Edens pediatrician. I was really anxious because we were told it would take about 3 weeks to hear back from EFMP, and we didn't really have three weeks to be waiting around for something so time sensitive.
I was, however, very please with how the application process went. We did a phone conference with her pediatrician while she filled out the paperwork, to make sure she got all the details in.
I was pretty optimistic with the answers we were able to give, like "no specialty care needed", "no specialty followup needed", "zero hospitalizations or emergency services needed in the past year", etc. She included the letter from the hematologist to back up her statements, as well as her own recommendation that Eden NOT be enrolled in EFMP.
Then we got the call from the realtor.The new appraisal on the house was done. Our realtor got a text from the lender saying 'all done, looks good'. We were sort of unsure what this meant, until we got the official word...it appraised the full value of the offer and we were cleared for closing again.
We sent off the EFMP application the next day. Greg tried to stress the urgency of this application, since it was very time sensitive. We just didn't have three weeks to wait, and we were just so anxious they would accept her and everything would be over.
I don't know if you're picking up on this or not, but we don't have very many 'wins' in this story. BUT there was ONE DAY that was just....WINNING. The next day, we got her denial letter from EFMP! She was rejected SO FAST, and we were SO HAPPY!! That afternoon we got a call from Ken saying our house closed a day early!! We were DONE!
Of course, there's always something, right? It had been months now, and we STILL had NO call to schedule our move, and the friends whose land our PODS were on sold their house and needed our stuff moved.
So we put together the strongest appeal in the world, with the head pediatric hematologist from the Walter Reed Clinic clearing her of all specialty care or followups, stressing that she needed no urgent, emergency, or inpatient care, requires ONLY routine pediatric care, her pediatrician saying the same thing, her new blood counts, and her denial letter from EFMP. And they were submitted to Japan the next day. We had to regroup about our household goods and figure out what to do with them, hoping to hear an answer back really quickly since it was submitted so fast.
......it took SIX WEEKS to finally hear back.
Happy Sewing!!
-Shelley
