One of the things I am most excited about in getting off the road is I will no longer have to “explain” my unique lifestyle to traditional institutions. So I was pretty bummed out when I realized during the mortgage loan process I wasn’t quite done with that. Since all of our banking is through Bank of America and my brother-in-law works there that’s where I started and was soon pretty disappointed in how anything outside of the lines raised a red flag.

First, I switched jobs in the last year so that meant double all my information including not only the amounts of my 401K but also the individual plan information documents. Since they are both through Fidelity and those documents are pretty standard, I was annoyed but after spending a day I collected the 27 documents they were looking for. Yes, that is not a typo…27 documents, crazy sauce. Once that was done, I was looking forward to focusing on other things…like how the heck we were going to get furniture, when I got a call late on Thursday that the underwriter needed some additional information.

They wanted a signed copy of my tax return and an email explaining my “unusual” living situation and an explanation of my two addresses. Now I was pissed. First off, my taxes were done via turbo tax and the document I provided was directly from their site. Secondly, they made me provide proof I have paid my taxes so why did any of that matter. The mortgage broker I am working with did send me the one page he wanted signed, but then Lee had to print it, we had to sign and then scan and send back all of which seemed ridiculously unnecessary. What really made me mad though was the email explaining why we had no rental history. It occurred to me that despite my stellar credit and having enough money in 401K to more than cover the entire loan they could use something like this to deny me and it really upset me. Seriously the last 10 years has been a string of incidences where not having a traditional sticks and bricks caused issues and the irony of that stopping me being able to move into a traditional situation really upset me. I am a tax paying, law abiding American citizen and where I choose to live should be no one’s business but mine. OK rant over.

I wish that was the worst of it but it was not. Since we had no rental history, they wanted a list of all the campgrounds we had stayed in over the last 2 years. Once we provided those, they wanted proof of “rental” payments. After some work Lee found all the AMEX receipts for all the payments to the campgrounds, but they refused to accept that. They wanted proof of timely “rent” payment from the campgrounds and sent all four of them a letter so they could verify we paid in a timely manner. At this point we are down to a few days before the bank was going to end the contract, and we had no doubt we would lose the house if we had to go to another bank. Since there was zero reason that the campgrounds would fill out these forms in a timely manner I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing. There are no rules guiding a mortgage company so basically, they can refuse to loan to anyone they want for any reason unless you can prove you are being discriminated against based on race, sexual orientation etc. Being a fulltime RVer is not on that list 🙂

One interesting thing is after we started talking to people about this we found out we weren’t alone. Someone else we know who came off the road had the same issue and ended up solving it by going to a local bank and having a sit down with them explaining the situation. I really wish we would have known that going in because we could have saved ourselves a lot of grief and heartache. After making tons of phone calls, we finally got the receipts from three of the four campgrounds we have stayed at but unfortunately the last campground in Northridge is actually our longest stay and since it is a small operation and privately owned, we are at their mercy. Apparently, they upgraded their reservation system at some point so our receipts are in an older database and the manager (who I knew briefly) couldn’t be bothered to even come to the phone or look at the request for several days. Simultaneously the clock was ticking on our timeline, and we were trying to figure out if with two weeks left, we could go to another bank. The downside of that was we would lose our appraisal (that came in well over the loan amount which was nice) and although it’s possible to transfer appraisals to another bank surprise surprise its not easy. The whole thing has turned me into a ball of stress which is not a great way to start out on a new portion of your life.

Finally, after going round and round with the bank they decided to use the RV loan (which is through Bank of America and we have been paying on for 10 years) as our “house” payments. Technically it is, so that made sense to me and I just had to write an email stating I was going to occupy the house immediately and stay in it for at least 12 months. I think they continue to be concerned I am going to use it as a rental. For the first time I really thought someone was thinking outside the box a little tiny bit as of this writing am waiting to see if that will actually be good enough. The fact that the appraisal came back quite a bit higher than the loan amount really seems to have helped a lot as well. It’s hard to say the loan is a bad bet when the loan to value ratio is 84%.

Finally, after several days of back and forth, the bank decided to use our 10-year RV loan as proof we could pay on time and as a substitute house payment. Kind of them since I have been paying this same bank for 10 years and always on time. Can you hear the sarcasm 🙂 Anyways we got our conditional loan approval and unless I get fired in the next two weeks or the house burns downs, we should be ok. I really feel all of this could have been solved quickly if we could have talked to the underwriter directly so my best advice to you in a similar situation is to find a local bank where the underwriter is on the premises. Some RV friends of ours who had a similar situation did just that and worked through the unusual circumstance pretty quickly. Trust me save yourself the grief!

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

• You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
• You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on Itune