Thoughts about financing

I've had several mortgages, refinances, and even a home equity line of credit. Individually, I've been through a fairly good-sized construction project. So, it seemed to me that financing this would be pretty straightforward. Wrong!

Construction loans bear no resemblance to anything I ever have dealt with. It's complicated by the fact that several lenders don't even want to touch a kit or fab project. A few things we have learned about financing:

1) Find out exactly what your builder will be required to do to satisfy the lender that he/she is legit, and make sure your builder understands and agrees up front.
This was the first time our builder had to deal with a client's lender. The lender asked for a whole bunch of information and required the builder sign forms that suggest he is a party to the loan agreement. Our builder is a totally reasonable guy. I wasn't comfortable asking him to do this, particularly as late in the process as we learned the requirements. And, of course this leads to two sets of lawyers to figure out how to resolve it. I think our contact at the lender will get us through this, but we won't really know until it's time to start making payments.

2) Find out how your payment schedule compares with the lender's standard, and what red tape or costs you might incur based on the planned payments.
We have a payment schedule that seems quite rational; the lender, however, requires a title search and inspection with each draw. Given the number of payments we agreed to, the potential fees associated with title searches and inspections could be huge. We have worked something out, but I was quite surprised to learn about this basically at closing - I would have expected to know early on that there are charges for these things and how the charges work.

3) Get a complete set of the template documents early in the process; read them and have your attorney read them as well.
The closing documents were voluminous compared with a typical mortgage - and given all the little snafus we had along the way, it was a bit nerve-wracking to be reviewing them at the last minute. We didn't have our copies until the closing, which was way too late. I probably would have done this anyway, but the stress of seeing these for the first time at closing got my back up.

End of the day, it's probably not the end of the world...
...as best as I can tell, the Earth is still in its regular orbit and Mars will have its very rare pass in front of the sun tomorrow.

End of the day, we're putting up a really neat house...
...we were at the site today - I can almost envision how it will look when the house is built and it becomes our home.

Peace.