My plot of dirt

The funds have been transferred to the settlement agent and I’m now a proud owner of a plot of dirt! Well technically, the bank owns the land because they are holding on to the title of the land, but yay me!

This journey started back in October 2008 and as you’d know, I’m not planning to build a house on it because I can’t afford it right now.

I’ve learnt some valuable lessons about the process. Firstly, all the agents involved from the real-estate agent, the mortgage broker, to the settlement agent (the one that collects the money for the real-estate agent) – why is there a need for such an agent?! – will assume that you know what you are doing. They will advise you to a certain extent but you are expected to know more, especially the things that are deemed common-sense to them. That is, they will assume that you do this on a daily basis.

So my advice is to be a total pain in the ass and ask as many questions that you can possibly think of, and call and email them frequently as long as it’s business hours. I wasn’t a pain in the ass and as a result, I was unnecessarily stressed out a lot rushing to meet this deadline and that filling out forms and transferring money between banks and accounts.

Second, any time there’s money involved between people, you are going to have a lot of arguments. In my case, it was with my parents. They chipped in for the deposit for the land so it is expected that they be anxious that I don’t fuck it up and thus causing them to lose the deposit or having to pay additional fees.

A lot of arguments were had about why am I not chasing up after such and such, when I didn’t even know what “such and such” was and why were they important. Argh! On many of these occasions, I was so tempted to yell out, “Buying this piece of land was YOUR idea!” But I just bit my tongue, sucked it up and stormed off. Hah!

I’m very glad that it is now over. But the next phase of stress begins: I better not get fired. :P