Organization

[kittydesade]

It is so very time for an organizational post. This one slightly more long term because there is no way I'm going to cram this all into the coming week.

1. Get. Credit. Report. Honestly, Jag.
2. Get safe deposit box for the Sparrow folder.
2a. Use that opportunity to talk to a banker there about pre-approval?
2b. And to deposit the family check.
3. Christmas presents for Dye Giant and Lurking Bandit
4. Clothes Inventory
4a. Pack up summer clothes
5. Personal Style discussion
6. Make list of 10 houses with the boy to contemplate, 5 of which we should be ready to look at.
7. Find local lawyer for the legal crap (starting 12/12)
8. Check with [as yet unnicknamed] aunt and see if she knows local good inspectors
9. Call bank and find out where the fuck the debit card is. (And no, there's no weird activity on my account, I've been checking)
10. Finish boy's arm-warmer
11. Music theory final exam, such as it is
12. 3 scenes at least on untitled Mecha story
12a. Which needs a title.
13. Shop the Music store for Gig bags
14. Chop some of the damn onions already!
15. Pre-cook chicken.
16. Re-read Swordspoint
17. Go over Spanish

Comments

[synecdochic]

FYI, I would not start the pre-approval process until you're ready to make an offer. Once you get approved the rate is only good for 45-60 days (depending on the bank), and once the approval expires, most places will run another credit report on you to make sure you haven't had any major changes -- and "mortgage pre-approval" is a hard pull, not a soft pull, so it does count against you for your credit score. So, you want to save the application for when you're ready to make an offer. (Assuming you can be confident that the bank will approve you for the amount you want to offer -- sometimes if you're really uncertain, you should discard this advice and apply just to find out how much money they'll give you -- but considering that they'd have written either Sarah or me individually for how much we wanted to borrow, much less jointly, due to our 800+ credit scores and our very high incomes on paper, we didn't have to worry about that.)

It may be strategic for you, if you aren't sure how much they'd approve you for and you want to move very quickly, to apply for the loan first and then find the house -- but considering that it took 33 days for us from "make offer" to "close on house" and that was fast, and you are unlikely to have the kind of history on your credit report that can weather one or two cycles of "hard pull, time expires, hard pull, time expires" (nobody knows for sure how much it dings you, the FICO is a black box, but people have reverse-engineered the box enough to guess that each month you have two or more hard pulls will knock your credit score down about 10-20 points after 60 days), I would advise you to find the house first and the loan second. *g*

[kittydesade]

... Believe it or not, you are the first person who has told me that and with a coherent, good reason why.

(Actually given the state of me at the moment, you might believe that.)

[synecdochic]

Credit reports and credit scores are one giant black box, but I learned a lot about it in my late 20s (I fucked up my credit but good in my early to mid 20s and had to treat it like a game to get out of my youthful fuckups) and so I enjoy the process of figuring out what is Good and what is Bad, from the point of view of Fair Isaac, way too much. *G*