Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (4 page)

A fine example of the kind of negotiating approach you should take can be found in the excellent corporate training film
The Godfather
, where, as part of his negotiations with a movie producer, Marlon Brando gains a subtle psychological advantage by arranging to have the producer wake up in bed next to the head of a deceased horse. (It could have
been worse; it could have been Marlon Brando.)

This is not to suggest that to get a good price on a house, you need to go around decapitating domesticated animals. No indeed; wild animals are more than adequate for most residential transactions. But the point is, you have to be firm.

At the outset of your negotiations, it is very important to create the impression that you don’t really want to buy the house at all, that in fact you
hate
the house, and the mere
thought
of it makes you physically ill. Your opening offer should convey this. It should be worded as follows: “We don’t want your house, so we will give you X number of dollars for it, including all major appliances and the children.” (Note that you should
not
name a specific amount. You should actually use the term “X number of dollars,” so as to avoid tipping your hand.) The broker will take your offer to the seller, who at this point has a number of options, such as:

1. He can accept your offer.
   

2. He can reject your offer.
   

3. He can give back the dinette set, the pool
   table, AND the Epcot Center vacation in exchange for whatever is behind curtain number two.
   

Another possibility is that he will make a counteroffer, which your broker will bring back for you to consider. “We don’t want to sell the house,” it might say. “We only put it on the market because we enjoy having total strangers come around and test-flush all our toilets. But we are willing to let it go for Y number of dollars, plus you can have little Deirdre, provided you raise her in a religious environment. We get the microwave.”

And then you send the broker back with another offer, and they send you another counteroffer, and so on until the broker, his fingers bloodied from typing up the various negotiating positions, drops dead in the street from exhaustion, which is the signal for the buyer and the seller to settle on a price equal to the original asking price minus about five percent. This is the price that everybody always winds up at, and if we all just agreed on it at the beginning, there would be a lot less hassle and inconvenience in the form of dead brokers. But we have to
ask ourselves if this would really be such a desirable outcome.

In any event, now that you and the seller have set a price, you need to sign the agreement of sale, which should be worded in standard legal terminology, as follows:

WHEREAS the Seller wants to sell, and the Buyer wants to buy, and they think they got a price that’s not too low or too high; and the Buyer gave the Seller a down payment to hold, now he’ll try to get a mortgage ’fore they BOTH grow old; and the Seller’s gonna see if he got termites in his place ’cause if he does, the Buyer’s gonna tear it right up in his face; but if everything is cool and nobody’s late, then the deal will go down on the Settlement Date.

We gon’ have a transaction tonight

Of course I realize you probably don’t understand some of this “legal jargon,” but this is only because you are stupid. This is why it’s important to ask several lawyers to give you contradictory advice before you sign anything, including get-well cards.

Meanwhile, however, it is time to go around to some banks and see if you can find one foolish enough to lend you some money.

The first thing you need to do is perform a detailed financial analysis of how much money you have versus how much you’re going to need to buy your house. The way you do this is you draw up what professional accountants call a “Balance Sheet,” which should look like this:

1. Savings account: $927.62
   

2. Checking account: Conceivably as much
   as $83.15, provided that the check you wrote to Mister Muffler has not been cashed yet
   

3. Other assets, primarily canned goods and undeveloped photographs of the airplane wing taken during your trip to Disney World: $44.02
   

1. Cost to pay random lawyers for God knows what (see “The Ritual Closing Ceremony”): $6,765.90
   

2. Cost to have various inspectors come around and hold clipboards and shine flashlights at things but fail to notice any sign that the heating system is going to explode moments after you take possession of your new home: $1,250
   

3. Taxes: $3,856.90
   

4. Additional taxes that nobody ever mentioned to you: $4,847.89
   

5. Taxes that are just now being rushed into law and will apply only to your specific house purchase: $5,563.92
   

6. “Points,” which is technically defined as “money that for some reason you have to give the bank, even though you are the one trying to buy the goddamn house, and no matter how many times you ask, you will never be given an intelligible explanation for this”: $8,745.00
   

7. Other (phone deposit, cost of actual house, etc.): $126,436.06
   

Now, using these figures, we can create the following graphic representation to compare the amount of money you have with the amount you need:

So we can see from this financial analysis that you are definitely going to need the bank to give you a lot of money in the form of a mortgage. The bank is willing to do this because, the way mortgages are set up, no matter how many payments you make,
you still owe the bank all the money you ever borrowed
. Really. This explains why, in all your wide circle of friends, you don’t know a single person who ever came close to paying off a mortgage. When you have a mortgage, at the end of every year the bank sends you a statement like this:

YOUR OUTSTANDING BALANCE AS OF THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR: $93,423.54

YOUR TOTAL PAYMENTS MADE DURING THE YEAR: $11,647.32

YOUR OUTSTANDING BALANCE AS OF THE END OF THE YEAR: $93,423.54

It may seem as though the banks are taking unfair advantage of consumers here, but they really have no choice. A few years back, they lent billions and billions of dollars to the Third World, which had promised to spend the money on factories and heavy machinery, but which in fact lost it gambling on rooster fights. And since the banks can’t very well march down to the Southern Hemisphere and repossess, for example, Brazil, you can understand why they have no choice but to get the money from average everyday unarmed consumers such as yourself.

All mortgages work basically the same way: You sign a bunch of papers, then you make large monthly payments until the Second Coming. Nevertheless, the top Consumer
Money Geeks all recommend that you “shop around” for your mortgage, because there are a number of different kinds available, each with its own terms, conditions, feeding habits, and so forth. Some of the more popular ones are:

• The Fixed-Rate Mortgage
  

• The Variable-Rate Mortgage
  

• The Mortgage Whose Rate Is Based on What Order the Teams Finish in the National League East
  

• The Mortgage with a Real Low Rate That Is Advertised in Huge Print in the Newspaper But Nobody Ever Actually Gets It
  

• The Balloon Mortgage
  

• The Party Hat Mortgage
  

• The Mortgage That Is Really the Expired Warranty for a 1966 Sears Washing Machine
  

• The Mortgage of the Living Dead
  

Here’s an important piece of advice to bear in mind when you’re shopping around for your mortgage: Don’t be intimidated. Sure, the bank is a great big, rich, powerful financial institution and you are a small,
worthless piece of scum. But that doesn’t mean you should walk into the bank with your hat in your hand, like some kind of beggar! Not at all! You should crawl into the bank!

Ha ha! Just kidding, of course. You have nothing to worry about. All the bank will ask you to do is supply the home phone number of everybody you have ever known, even casually, since the fourth grade. Then you’ll have an interview with a Loan Officer, who’ll ask you a few standard screening questions, such as: “To get this mortgage, are you willing to lick the gum wads off my shoe bottoms?”

Assuming that you come up with the correct answers (“yes”) to these questions, your mortgage application will be sent on to the Committee to Hold Up All the Mortgage Applications for Several Months. This will give you time to practice signing checks in preparation for the Ritual Closing Ceremony.

This is an important and highly traditional part of the home-buying process, the last major hurdle you must clear before you become an Official Homeowner. It is comparable to the initiation ceremonies at major college fraternities, where, to prove that he is worthy of the privileges and responsibilities of membership, the pledge must perform some feat such as attending a Papal Mass wearing only a softball glove.

Essentially, what you must do, in the Ritual Closing Ceremony, is go into a small room and write large checks to total strangers. According to tradition, anybody may ask you for a check, for any amount, and you may not refuse. Once you get started handing out money, the good news will travel quickly through the real estate community via joyful shouts: “A Closing Ceremony is taking place!” Soon there will be a huge horde of people—lawyers, bankers, brokers, insurance people, termite inspectors, caterers, photographers, people you used to know in high school—crowding into the closing room and spilling out into the
street. You may be forced to hurl batches of signed blank checks out the window, just to make sure that everyone is accommodated in the traditional way.

Another ritual task you must perform during the Closing Ceremony is frown with feigned comprehension at various unintelligible documents that will be placed in front of you by random individuals wearing suits:

Once the various officials present are satisfied that you truly wish to become a homeowner and have no checks left, they will award you a mortgage, which will spell out your new duties and obligations in standard legal terminology.