I live in Saudi Arabia. My wife is in our house in Pennsylvania. We got the house on a balloon mortgage. My wife is not-so-good with money.
I want to refinance before the teaser rate goes away. I will be home in a couple of weeks for two weeks. How does one refinance? I am guessing it involves going to the bank. What paperwork do I need? How quickly can I make this happen?
Start online at quicken loans. You might be able to be 90% done with the process before you leave the sandbox.
Assuming your wife is at least able to find and copy a few key papers from your files then fax or snail-mail them in.
The last mortgage I got took over a month, and closer to two. I’m thinking refinancing is on a similar time scale. However, it only took an hour to close, and that’s the main thing we had to do in person. The rest took emails and faxes and gathering up paperwork and waiting for the bank to do their thing, mostly. So you might be able to prepare everything ahead of time and schedule a day to sign all the papers when you’re in the country.
Quicken loans says they cannot help me while I am outside the US. So am I back to going to the bank?
For me it only took like an hour at the bank but then it took time to wait for the appraiser (the appraiser works for the bank and decides how much your house is worth so they can decide how much equity you have to know what rate you qualify for), then the appraiser’s decision, paperwork from oh high, etc.
I did have to have a lot of cash going into it, to pay up my equity and to prove I could pay their fees. I think if you have that, or a good amount of equity, and start with a call to the banker they can get you started by phone.
Get together 2 months worth of bank statements, pay stubs and 2 years of taxes. That is most likely what they will be looking for. Your house will probably have to be appraised, and you’ll have to pay for it. Can’t your wife take care of this if you’re not in the country? You say she’s not good with money, but just tell her what forms she needs to fill out.
Damn. I hope they understood the property was in PA. I think I’d call them again before I gave up that easily.
My next suggestion would be to contact the bank or whatever that originated you current loan. Even if they’ve sold it on, they may be able to do a simplified refi which will take less admin crap and cost less in fees. Mostly they’ll probably be faster. They may not offer you the best possible interest rate, but given the rest of your problems that may be the best you can do.
If they have sold your mortgage on then in some cases the entity they sold it to (the entity you make payments to now) may also be a mortgage originator in their own right. So they’d be my next call.
Big picture, as the others above have said, there’s a lot of leg work that must be done and takes a lot of calendar time as well as a lot of riding herd on 15 subcontractors doing stuff while none of them much care about your deadlines. All of which you (through your lender) need to order, but none of which you need to do personally.
The only thing you need to do personally is sign papers at the closing. Which can even be done remotely while you’re in SA if you’ve got a cooperative title company. I’ve done closings where the buyers & sellers were both married couples and all four people were in different US states on the day of reckoning. FedEx and phones are wonderful things.
It may even be possible to have your wife sign on your behalf if she has appropriate Power of Attorney and PA’s laws and everybody’s policies are OK with it. This is frankly a long shot though.
Starting this whole process just 4 weeks before you go back to SA is waaay late. I’d be planning on getting the ball(s) rolling while in PA, then monitoring and completing the process after returning to SA.
Thank you all very much. Plan is to visit the bank when I am home.
If I were you, I’d contact them while I was still overseas, to see how much of the process you can get started before you fly home.
When I refinanced about two years ago it was about a month from getting the required documents to the bank and closing. I simply emailed the person we worked with at the bank for the original mortgage and told her what we wanted to do. She sent a list of what she needed, which we got to her within a couple days. There was an appraisal and then we scheduled closing.
This.
My last three (or is it four?) mortgages were arranged from companies in different states than I (and my property) was. I never set foot in any of their offices. 100% of this can be done by phone and email.
If you’re trying to deal with a small town bank with small town ways you’re probably setting up for failure given the Saudi Arabia challenge. Use one of the national players.
Try these guys: https://www.nbkc.com/. They originated my current mortgage despite being in a state that wasn’t the one I was living in nor the one where the property was/is. I only ever dealt with my lending “officer” via email & phone. I got hooked up with them via one of the “cheap mortgage finder” websites three-plus years ago. I have no complaints about price or customer service.
What LSL said. The only time we had to be physically present for anything during our last refinance was when we met a notary at Panera to sign the note and homestead waiver and such. We used Guaranteed Rate and everything else was done by phone or online.
Realtor here. I will also suggest Quicken, who have helped my clients out in difficult situations. They seem to have their shit together, and can sometimes out-do local banks for local situations.
In general, the more you have ready in advance, the faster it goes. Any skeletons in your financial closet? They will haunt you, so be prepared to explain or counteract. The more data you have up-front, the better. Attack the loan officer (sort of), and anticipate the return attack. If you can handle that, you’re home free. Convince the loan officer that it’s in his best interest to approve your loan, and others are eagerly waiting to offer you the money.
Loan officers want to make loans. They get paid on how many they make. They get demerits on how many they make that end up in the toilet. Make your loan app look good (even if it’s not), you’re golden. If you can’t make it, fake it.
I don’t work for Quicken loans, and I don’t stand to make a nickel off them, but I started the refinance process with them on May 15, 2014 and I closed on June 5, 2014. Everything was handled by email and telephone except for the closing. For that they sent a notary and a witness to my house on an evening after work when it was convenient for me.
I’ve gotten six mortgages over the last 40 years and it was by far the least burdensome. The best rate too, 2.875% fixed.
Ha! I didn’t even realize that was a valid tactic, but that’s what I did when I went for my re-fi. I really wanted to get my mortgage through them (a local bank with an excellent reputation and rates) so I totally grovelled to the loan officer about how awesome I was at paying my mortgage and how much interest I owed. I don’t know that it “worked” but the appraisal that the bank came back with was on-the-nose of what it had to be for me to qualify. Hmm…
As others have noted, there’s really no reason for you to need to be in the US for anything other than the final closing. I’ve done multiple mortgages but it was mostly via phone and email and no one ever asked me if I was in the US or not. But the thing is that you do need to be present for the closing and from start to finish takes longer than 2 weeks, so you don’t want to wait until you’re home for two weeks to get the ball rolling.
I wouldn’t suggest using banks’ teaser rates or Quicken either. I would go with an online mortgage aggregator, e.g. Zillow, and see what’s the best rate you can get from a highly rated lender. (Make sure to check the reviews, although you may need to filter out the ones from people who clearly don’t understand the mortgage process.)
Ask for participation in their relocation services division, or words to that effect. My first instinct was to shout “Quicken Loans!”, because when I was preparing my move from China back to the USA, they were awesome. Now I realize that you’re not relocating, but I’m hopeful that they can help you.
In my case, living in China, they were able to fully underwrite my loan for me before even stepping foot into the USA and finding a house. I don’t mean “pre-qualified,” “pre-approved,” etc., but fully underwritten sans property details. They had a check waiting for me when the title cleared.
I hate to shill for companies, but (a) they’re local, and (b) they were really f’ing awesome every step of the process.