We went house hunting in the past two months thinking that we could already afford it. Haha. We were in for a suprise since we didn't know that you need to pay up at least 20% cash for equity before you could get a bank loan. Realizing that we found a nice little house with affordable downpayment and monthly amortization. We immediately latched on the idea of getting the house, but wanted more time to think about it. We unfortunately fell for the real estate agent's spiel that we should immediately pay for the reservation fee. So we did.
After paying for the reservation fee I started having doubts. Big doubts that I was unable to sleep for a few nights. I always take time to make big purchases. It takes me about a year before I actually purchase a PC. So you can just imagine my anxiety at purchasing a house. Sweetie and I talked about it and did additional computations and research. We then decided to forgo buying a house so we could save up for more equity.
The next day I went to see the property developer to tell them that we were letting the house go. She said that she could only return 80% of our reservation fee because the real estate agent already got her agent's fee. The property developer explained that this was common practice for them and even showed me the signed voucher. I was surprised that they released the fee even though the sale was unconsumated.
So it was a badly rushed decision for us. What was painful though was how the real estate agent rushed us to put in some money even though I said that I wanted to forego it for more thinking time. I had thought that I could trust the real estate agent to put our needs foremost before anything else since I had known her since I was a kid. We had heard a lot of complaints about her prior to engaging her services, but we let it go as hearsay since we had known her for decades.
We did not try to get the money anymore and just let it be a hard earned lesson about saying no.
A hard earned lesson talaga. When we gave the reservation fee for our new house this Feb, we gave P20T immediate upon meeting the owner the first time for we really liked the house and she said she has a lot of offers for the house. So we gave her the money and talked about the terms but after a new weeks she changed her tune and wants more money but PAG-IBIG advises not to give money upfront. I had to contact a laywer and he said if you decide to back out say goodbye to your 20T if we don't want more legal problems in the future. It took 5 months of sleepless nights, we got our home but I wished we did not get so much stress and anxiety acquiring it
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