If a friend tells you that securing a home loan will be a simple and rewarding process, end that friendship yesterday. They are a liar and you don’t need that kind of influence in your life. You need a friend like me who will tell you the truth!

Getting a home loan is a horrible process … borderline tortuous. Have you ever seen a prison inmate going through the home loan process? No, you have not. They have rights and that would be ruled unconstitutional on account of it being a cruel and unusual punishment. It is that bad!

I know because I am in the middle of getting a home loan. I have been working on it for the better part of a year, partially (but not fully) due to some complications on my end. When my husband’s mill closed down, the loan was put on hold. Something about not being able to pay bills when one doesn’t have a job. I don’t know, seemed silly to me.

Anyway, we are back on track now, but we basically had to start the process over again. I expected (and dreaded) the 1,000 times that I would have to sign my name again and the 4.7 million pieces of paperwork that needed to be sent, but I did not see the money laundering accusations that came this time.

I am not even making that up either. I got a call from the loan company informing me that my banking information alerted them to the possibility that I was a money launderer. Their reasoning? My husband and I both get paid weekly so there are a lot of checks flowing through our bank account.

In order to clear this up, we have to prove that our checks come from our work place. One would think that the years’ worth of pay-stubs that we sent would be good enough, but they were not.

To recap that, we’ve sent them around 100 pay-stubs proving our income, which match the deposit amounts in our bank, but they need more proof. Perhaps our boss will need to provide a sworn deposition? I wouldn’t count that out at this point.

This all seems very silly to me considering that any money launderer with common sense would not engage in anything that would allow people to poke through his/her financial information, but maybe I am wrong. Maybe money launderers are dumb people? I don’t know any … that I know of anyway. It also seems to me like money laundering would be a lucrative enough (though illegal) business that one could pay for their house in cash? Laundered cash, but cash nonetheless.

I’m wondering now if I should consider this kind of “career”. Surely the risks of prison outweigh the horrendousness of the home loan process. At least in prison I won’t be subjected to that much torture.

For questions, comments, or if you need someone to talk you out of buying a home with a loan, email me at christyrasmussen@yahoo.com.