Life’s Been So Stressful
This September, my wife and I started viewing houses to buy for our first home. This’s been a long time coming—for the past 5 years, we’ve been saving aggressively and safely investing our savings in index funds, which have performed remarkably well.
We genuinely thought it’d take us at least a few months to find a house that we’d want to put an offer in for just because our budget is tight and we’re looking in one of the least affordable places in Canada (the Greater Toronto Area), but, as luck would have it, we came across a gorgeous freehold townhouse that we both loved within 2 weeks of viewing. The listed price was almost $100k out of our comfort zone, but we put in an offer anyways because many properties here have been sold under asking these days.
Shockingly to us, after a few rounds of negotiations, our offer was accepted at a price well within our budget!
As amazing as that is, the acceptance also marked the beginning of a very stressful period for me.
First, we had only 24 hours to send our 5% deposit—once you factor in most banks’ opening hours of 9 to 5, we really only had 8 hours to do it. What would normally be a very simple task turned out to be a highly stressful one for me—the bank I needed to make the deposit was experiencing a national system outage and could not deposit bank drafts. Needless to say, I was just boiling in anxiety that day. Thankfully, I finally managed to make the deposit just 2 hours before the bank closed.
Second, we had only 6 business days from the day of the offer acceptance to secure a mortgage commitment from a lender and do home inspection. Once again, I was just in a state of heightened anxiety until our broker sent us the commitment letter from a lender just 2 days before the deadline.
I was so anxious and stressed that I could tell that my heart rate was constantly higher than usual. I checked my resting heart rate logged by my Apple Watch, and, sure enough, it actually shows:
It doesn’t get better from there. During those 6 business days, the offer was at least conditional on us clearing the home inspection (which, thankfully, came back with no major issues) and securing a mortgage loan—we could still walk away if we deemed either of those conditions unsatisfactory. However, after we waived those conditions, the offer was considered firm and there was no more takesies-backsies. This means that if our lender for some reason refused to give us the mortgage loan, we’d have to find some way to pay for the property (or if we can’t, declare bankruptcy I guess???) because we’ve officially purchased it.
I cannot begin to tell you how much this stresses me out, despite our patient broker’s repeated reassurances that we have nothing to worry about.
The commitment letter from the lender has multiple conditions we’d need to meet after the offer is firm and before we get the keys to the new house, and this is where we’re at now. We’ve been actively working with our broker to satisfy those conditions. I thought we had an extremely clean and straightforward file because we’re not using any gifted money for the down payment, but somehow we still ran into a small hiccup that we’re working on resolving with the bank.
This has brought me so much anxiety that I’ve been feeling too paralyzed to do anything. I’ve put a pause on practicing piano 3 times a week as I promised myself, playing Hollow Knight and even blogging. Until this hiccup is resolved, I’ll just be in anxious waiting mode. I’m finally writing this blog post as a way to cope with and distract myself from my anxiety.
Fingers crossed that we clear all the conditions this week.
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