All Lenders Are Warthogs

Once upon a time many different animals came together to form a community.

Jim was a muskrat. He was married to Tara, also a muskrat, and they had a litter of four together. He taught at Meadow Campus school, and he was tired of so much of his earnings going to Owl Mutual Bank. He and his family scoured the fields and the village, and they found some mighty nifty foreclosures. One was only a hollow log, but Jim and Tara thought they could probably manage. The muskchildren agreed.

Jim had already talked to the owls about buying an investment log, but they weren't so helpful. They wanted 20% down on the log and wouldn't agree to the idea of it being an owner-occupied log. They figured that there would be no way you'd go back to a log if you already had a hollow tree where the village meets the meadow, which he had. But Jim was less bound by social convention than most, and he was willing to give up the hollow tree and regress to the log if it meant some lasting benefit to himself or his family.

So the middle-aged muskrat contacted a lender that he'd known from a previous deal at Wells & Warthog. They were on the phone for a while hashing out details of a pre-approval letter, interest rates, etc. Lois the Warthog* said she'd run some numbers and then give a call back. A few minutes later she did. She announced that Wells & Warthog wanted cash reserves in the amount of six months principal, interest, taxes, and insurance for both properties. Not to mention closing costs and origination fees. Jim was not sure that he had cash reserves of this size. In fact, he was pretty sure he didn't. So he told Lois that he appreciated her efforts and that he would put things on hold until either the tax refund came back or the first property sold. And he wondered how the woodland creatures would ever get their economy moving again when they couldn't grant a pre-approval letter for a $20,000 loan to a muskrat who'd been doing the same job for 16 years at the same school.

Traveling home that day, Jim the Muskrat considered saving up $20,000 in cash and buying his hollow log outright. No closing costs. No appraisal. No attempts to impress the warthog. This was sounding better and better all the time.

*Lois the Warthog is actually a very nice lady of a quite different name. But the idea of lenders being warthogs appealed to me.