Don't Change a Thing Until Your Escrow Closes

Don't change a thing until your escrow closes.

What does that mean exactly?

• Don't charge anything on your credit cards
  
  
• Don't get married
  
  
• Don't get a divorce
  
  
• Don't purchase a car
  
  
• Don't change jobs
  
  
• Don't start attending school
  
  
• If you're attending school already, don't take out additional student loans
  
  
• Don't borrow any money
  
  
• Don't retire

In short...DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING.

Why not? Underwriters are checking their list and checking it twice. It is becoming common for an underwriter to rerun credit and do additional verification of facts right up to funding. A little change, like deciding to retire or purchasing a car could send your underwriter into paroxysms and bring your escrow to an untimely death. In order to keep your purchase from becoming a dead escrow, keep your situation, not just financial but everything, the same as it was the day you completed your loan app. If you HAVE to change something, call your lender and ask how it will effect the loan BEFORE you actually make the change.

Please take this to heart. The loan process has become a mine field. Lenders and banks, once a permissive lot who gave out money to anyone who could fog a mirror have gone to the other extreme and now want documentation, verification, attestation, authentication, certification, confirmation, information and substantiation and they may want it more than once during the loan process.

To repeat, don't change anything with your life situation during your escrow. Keep your situation the same throughout the escrow process and things should go relatively smooth at least as far as your qualifying for the loan goes.

There are other mountains to scale during the escrow process for instance the appraisal...the grand Pooh-Ba of the escrow process. We'll save appraisal pitfalls for another day.