And it's all ours.....

As of 2pm on this day, the land is finally ours!!  All ours!!

We bought the land back in May last year and it has taken nearly one year but it's finally ours.  We are a proud owner of a block of land at The Ponds.

Like I have described in the previous post, everything seemed to have happen all at the very same time for us.  Whilst we are excited that everything is progressing for us, although a little bit slower than we expected, but we are also overwhelmed and amazed with the amount of effort that we are putting in to get to this far.

I never thought for a second that this would be an easy journey.  Especially with all the tell-tales I have been hearing so far.  But I haven't heard anything bad about the bank.  Well I happened to have one pain to add to the list!

I've said in my previous post that our bank has caused us a lot of grief in our already approved loan application.  To be more specific they expired our loan offer with not much notice at all.

We didn't receive the loan offer document for signing until the first week of January.  I can still remember clearly the date that was on that document was 29 December 2010.  We've signed all the papers that we need to sign and get the witness required on some of the documents and hand everything back to our broker within a couple of days of receiving the document.

We are told to open an account with the bank for direct debit purposes and the bank needs to ID us.  We are also getting a credit card as part of the package so we need to go to the bank to collect it anyway.  We did all this in the first to second week of January.  We've done everything that the bank has asked us to do.

Not only after a couple of weeks later, our broker rang us in a very very concerned voice.  She told us our loan has expired since the 1st January 2011!!  Imagine the horror look on my face when I hear this news.  The settlement is due on 9 February and we have less than two weeks to come up with the fund to settle the land.

I can't believe that the bank staff failed to notify us that our loan offer has expired when we went in to the branch to open our accounts and collecting our cards.  Furthermore how is it that the loan expired after two days they typed the loan offer.  Even if they did sent it on the 29th or 30th, do they realise that New Year's eve is on the 31st?  and that the document won't reach us until the 3rd or 4th January 2011 due to public holiday imposed nationally!?

It hasn't stop to amaze me how these bank operates really.  I just didn't expect this from one of the major bank in Australia.  It just goes to show how disorganise they are and have the I want your business only attitude.  They keep saying that this was not their fault and it's the law changes by the government that requires them to do so.  What a load of ..... [fill in the blank].  How quickly they are to blame someone else and not own the issue themselves.

So we had to again sign another customer declaration document that states that our circumstances hasn't changed and we have to submit our payslips again along with my wife's tax return document for the last year and this year's forecast.  For your information this would be the 7th sets of payslips that I have to give to the bank.  They really do love our payslips don't they?  Oh and we have to do this by 31 January.  We really only have a couple of days to come up with all the required document, which is not east to get I might add.  Well my payslips are easy as I can just print it off online but my wife's income tax return won't be too easy as she needed to get an accountant to do her tax return forecast.

We did all this and it has now been approved for the second time.  One would think that everything should be fine from here on...  No, it is not.  They still managed to do another stuff up.  One person rang our broker saying that the documents are on their way.  This is the new loan offer document that we had to sign for the second time and this is about a week prior to the settlement day, which is enough time to sign and return the document if that was the case.

Three days later, another person rang our broker saying that they are sending it and we should have the document by tomorrow and that we should return it immediately.  That was on Friday, just a few days before the settlement date, which is on Wednesday.  Our solicitor kept ringing us to ask about the progress of the loan as they need to make an appointment with the bank on the settlement date.  Expiring our loan offer was already testing our patience but this?  This is really pushing it way too far...

To cut long story short, I had to take time off work when my schedule was really full and it's like crazy and got my wife who was working in Chatswood at that time to come all the way to the city so that we can sign the document in front of the bank staff who act as a witness.

We did manage to hand everything back to the office who issue the loan document for us at 4.45pm.  15 minutes before closing time and we were just exhausted after all that running around the city.

In a way, we are relieved to find out that our solicitor was able to make the appointment and settle on the due date.

But given the opportunity again, I think I'll go with another bank as I now have only negative experience with this bank.  Please message me if you like to know the name of this bank and I will happily share it with you.

For now let's just stick to the feeling "We own a piece of Australia"!!