Good thing I had that emergency fund

Because it looks like we won’t be closing until Tuesday, and I have to pay a $100 penalty for every day past last Tuesday we go. Including holidays and weekends. So this is probably going to end up costing me over a thousand dollars (since Tuesday is just the latest in a long line of missed deadlins), plus lost productivity dealing with various people about this crap.
We had originally blamed the mortgage broker for all this. He initially told us that we could close in two weeks, so we set the closing date 4 weeks out with the possibility of closing early. Clearly, that didn’t happen. He would send me some forms to sign or a request for documentation, and I would be able to get what he needed back to him within an hour or so. Every time we would go through that dance, he would say something along the lines of “Ok, that’s everything we need. We’re done!”
You can imagine my frustration at repeatedly being told “We’re done!” only to have another request for documentation the next day. We had a similar issue with getting the appraisal done. Repeatedly we were told that it had been done, only to find out that the appraisal had not been filed with the lender as of last Tuesday–our original closing date. Our broker kept telling us before that day that he wasn’t worried about closing on-time.
It turns out, he wasn’t worried because the lender was (and I’m being generous here) miscommunicating with him. They were the ones telling him we were done. They were the ones who said they had the appraisal. So other than him being insufficiently on their asses, he’s not the real bad guy here.
That being said, someone’s gotta pay the penalty. That someone is not gonna be me. I’ve got little hope that the lender–who is responsible for this delay–is going to do anything here.
And people wondered why I wanted to save up and pay cash for a house. I told my wife the other day that this experience has probably shortened my life by the approximate time it would have taken us to raise the other 80% of the purchase price.
Which leads us to the one good thing about this entire experience: It has convinced my wife that we should never do it again.
She’s not a Dave Adherent. She’s a “Getting a credit card is not worth a divorce” Adherent, and that’s what she tells the cash register people when they offer her a Target Card. She follows the principals because she loves me and has faith that I know what I’m doing. Every now and then, life hands her an example that her faith is well-placed. Last night she told me “next time we buy a house, and I say ‘can’t we get just a little bit of a mortgage to get a little bit better house?’, remind me of this.”
Gotta look for the small victories sometimes.