I've got your deposit right here

My Smaller Half and I want to buy a house.  But we've hit a snag - we have no money.

Apparently a few years ago there was a big stink-up because some chumps in the USA borrowed more money than they could ever afford to pay back, plunging the world into a screaming spiral of horror and causing a number of billionaire sociopaths on Wall St to temporarily lose their jobs.  As a result, Australia's pinko government rammed laws through parliament infringing my democratic right to borrow more money than I could ever afford to pay back, thus grossly offending my inflated sense of entitlement.  This country is stuffed!

After ringing 4 banks and 3 other non-banks (by which I mean non-bank financial institutions rather than other non-banks such as ice-cream vans or Belgian pederasts) I resigned myself to having to live in penury for another 3 months until those juicy payslips giving me substantially less than I used to earn in my old job start rolling in.  But then I got put onto a mortgage broker in town who turns out to have all sorts of tricky tricks up his sleeve, so maybe we're still in with a chance.  Actually it's not so much that he has tricky tricks, it's more that he seems to motivated by wanting to succeed, whereas the loan processors at the banks and non-banks seem to be motivated mostly by malice and spite.

We had a two hour meeting with him on Friday where he sussed us out and did some brainstorming of possible ways around the road blocks.  It was really interesting to watch a professional from another field work.  It reminded me of nothing so much as a good doctor taking a really thorough medical history.

For example, it's important to know what medications people are on (for both doctors and banks, but I'm talking about doctors now).  So you ask them, and they tell you.  And then you typically ask them about a whole bunch of medications that most people don't think of as medications, like the contraceptive pill, asthma inhalers, anti-inflammatories and other analgesics, insulin, and so on.  It's easy to start thinking that people are pretty dumb for not telling you this the first time.

But lo, yesterday the shoe was upon the other foot.  He asked me if I had any debt.  No, I said, quite proud of myself.  Any credit cards?  Oh, yes, sure.  Any HECS debt?  Oh, yes, that too.  Oops.

And, just like a doctor, sometimes he used words and jargon that I didn't understand.  It's incredible how many times I've seen doctors walk up to a patient, dump a mouthful of polysyllabic Graeco-Latin blah-blah on them, then consider the job done.  It's excruciating to witness, and now I know how difficult it is to get it to stop when it's done to you.

It's really hard to ask questions about what something means when you can't remember what the thing was even called.  I'm sure he was horrified when I got my Third Party Mandated Lending Policy Exception mixed up with my Conditional Approval Pending Party People Mandate.  Or something.  It'd be like confusing your cardiorenal syndrome with your velocardiofacial syndrome.

I reacted by just calling the different things "The First Thing" and "The Second Thing" and so on.  I must try that on Monday morning when I turn up to my first surgical ward round of the year.  I'm sure it'll be looked upon kindly.