A kick in the asterisk

Ever since we started trying to refinance our mortgage, people have been telling me what a terrific time this is to refinance and what a difference refinancing made for them: "We'll have our house paid off in 15 years instead of 30!" "Our monthly payments were reduced by 30 percent!" "Our new interest rate is so low the bank sends us money every month!" Okay, I made up that last one, but it captures the tone of my colleagues' comments.

Our experience has been different. I don't want to go into a lot of painful details about a process that continues to drag on into its fourth heart-wrenching week, but we've run into a few snags, not the least being that my husband's income does not fit neatly into the kinds of little electronic boxes loan officers like to fill up with honking big numbers. Everything about our financial situation seems to require an asterisk. We're just not normal, which shouldn't surprise any regular readers of this site but seems to have utterly befuddled our loan officers.

The whole process has been a huge burden and a distraction and a pain in the brain and we don't seem to be any closer to a final answer than we were a month ago, but we have to keep pushing on or face Dire Consequences. So when I ought to be preparing for classes or doing committee work or writing clever blog posts or editing conference papers, I'm tracking down documents to explain those annoying asterisks next to all those little boxes on loan forms or I'm meeting with loan officers who have never encountered our kind of weirdness before and don't know how to deal with it. This makes me want to go home and pull the covers over my head.

But I go on, wending my way through the asterisks armed only with a pen and a sheaf of documents. I'm trying not to think about that miserable Dickensian character--is it in Bleak House?--whose life withers away while she waves sheaves of documents in the faces of powerful people who can't (or won't) try to understand them. Instead, I'm trying to cherish my asterisks. We are so very unusual that the banks don't know what to do with us! I feel so special I could just scream!