Closing Date!

Closing date is one of the greatest days in your home search journey even if it is not your first home. After months of searching you finally get the keys to your dream home and the excitement of it all can make you overlook some finer details that could leave you fretting and fuming on the day.

Normally a day before closing is when you will visit your lawyer to sign all the papers and ensure that everything is in order. By this time the mortgage money will be the lawyer too and all you need to do is complete the down payment and sign on the several dotted line.

A point to remember here is that on closing date, the house belongs to you from 00:00 and therefore the previous owners if your are buying a resale home should be out of the house at 23:59 the previous day. Do make sure that your insurance coverage on the home is effective on this date. Also, ensure that you visit the house you are buying before you go to pick the keys. This will ensure that if the previous owners haven't moved out as yet, you can let your lawyers deal with the incident.

The reason why I say this and again it may not be true in all situations is because it happened to us. We went to pick up the keys of our home in the afternoon and when we went to enter our new home we found out that the previous owners were still in what was now our house. Since this was the first house that we were buying, we were not completely aware of what the rules were and the result was that our closing date was pushed back by a day.

Technically, we had every right to make a scene and ensure that all the stuff that was in our house was thrown out. However, we chose to be civil about it and that was what left us fretting and fuming and ruined what was supposed to be a pleasurable experience. To add to that the previous owners dumped a lot of garbage on the sidewalk and as luck would have it, we were hit by one of the worst snow storms of the year. This meant that we did not know what was under the snow for weeks after we took possession of the home.