The housing thing, continued...

Well, I've talked to two mortgage lenders, and it seems that all the information I've recieved on the More House 4 Less program - not only from their website, but from the ONE ON ONE COUNSELING SESSION THAT I HAD TO ATTEND, DURING WHICH THEY LOOKED OVER EVERY FINANCIAL STATEMENT OF MINE FOR THE LAST 3 MONTHS, neglected one minor detail - that if you actually have ANY savings, you aren't elgible for the loan.

Talk about a perverse incentive. Had I done what I wanted to do with my money - bought a new car, a plasma TV, a new computer - I would have been elgible for an interest-free loan of $5000 towards closing costs that wouldn't be due for 15 years. But stupid me, I saved some instead, and now I have to use my expensive money rather than the government's cheap money. The only people the goverment helps buy houses, evidently, are those who have absolutly no savings.

It really doesn't make sense, since I fit well into the income guidlines, which are close to $80,000. So if you pull in $75,000 a year but don't save any, the government will help you out, but if you make far less than that and struggle to put some away, screw you, sucker.

That alone pisses me off. I should still be able to swing this - I'm actually about two steps away from putting an offer on a house (assuming it isn't sold by the time I get my ducks in a row), but it's going to be way tougher. $5000 represents a not-insignificant chunk of my savings, and not having that expected loan towards closing costs means I will have much fewer savings - savings I had already planned on spending on things like furniture, a treadmill, and a car that doesn't break down every couple months. So now I will likely have a 2-bedroom townhouse with milk crates for furniture. I will also have very little money left for emergencies.

What really pisses me off about this is how much time I wasted. I took off twice from work to go to these sessions, I gathered an assload of documents for the one-on-one session, and for nothing. I also put off looking for a house for two months waiting for my certificate. Not only that, but when I called the place that did the counseling, they had never heard of the limits on assets - but both lenders I spoke to had. Either the state is doing an incredibly shitty job of communicating to it's lenders the details of the program (although one of the lenders I spoke to called the state and was told the same thing - that if you had any money, you couldn't get DSLEP), or the state is doing an incredibly shitty job of explaining to it's couselors and on it's website of a rather major detail about it's program.

Fuck, you would think I was the only person who had ever thought to save some money before buying a house - yet I'm pretty poor by most standards, and by most of the personal-finance message boards and blogs I read. So it seems the government has designed a program that gives lots of money to people who couldn't (to steal a line from the movie Slasher) finance a piece of bubblegum with $200 down, while ignoring those who could use a little boost to help them meet other financial goals and have a little saved for the inevitable emergency.

This is possibly one of the more profanity-laced and least-thought-out blog entries I've ever posted - I usually try not to do that. But for the last two days, I've been walking around with a desire to either burst into tears or punch someone, sometimes at the same time. This process is frustrating me on so many levels. I shouldn't be like this - fuck, I'm probably about to buy my first house in the near future, and that should be the happiest fucking day of my life, but I'm pissed about the way the State has gotten my hopes up and then kicked me in the nuts.