Well, blow me down - America is still full of surprises, anyway. After my saga with trying to talk about mortgages to my Bank, I mentioned this to a friendly real estate agent, who put me in contact with her preferred broker. I talked to him on the phone, gave him some details and assent to perform a credit check, and 20 minutes later he calls back to inform me that I/we have pre-approval for a mortgage up to $170K - this without Cat even earning an income!
Of course final approval will require a sheaf of paperwork, and an evaluation of the house, but that only happens after we've found a house & struck a deal, so we're now free to go house-hunting, with a budget. I didn't realise things could happen so fast! I double-checked, and yes, this is prime-rate lending (in fact the best rate on offer), so nothing dodgy about it, and no strange ideas about interest-only mortgages or anything odd like that.
Feeling just a little dazed about it, to be honest: but I've started to dig up information about repossessed houses in the area, already, and we stopped & did a drive-by of a couple of them, last night.
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On an entirely different note, there is one aspect of living in the USA that I'm not sure I'll ever get used to: that is, the idea that it is legal to execute a right-hand turn through a red light (absent opposing traffic that is). Every time, I'm sitting looking at the red light until someone honks to remind me - the whole idea just runs counter to my instincts: whaddaya mean, run a red light? Are you mad, that's a cop car just over there!
*Sigh* maybe I'll eventually get used to it, I suppose, but it's sure going to take a lot of work to overcome the ingrained instincts. I do wonder, also, whether this doesn't actually breed a certain disdain among drivers here for red lights generally - I've certainly noticed a lot more willingness to run the red lights here than in the UK, or NZ (of course that might have a lot to do with the absence of red-light cameras!)
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