The first time I flew, I went from Shanghai to Toronto back in August 2001. I didn’t (still don’t) even know which airline I took, or where the stop over was (I remember there being one, where we had to unload and reload our luggage), or even which ocean we crossed (I suspect it was the Atlantic). I was 13 back then. I didn’t know much, but I knew China was not for me.

Nearly a decade later, I flew across the Atlantic to experience that European life that North Americans kept going on about. And August 2021, I flew back. With every move, every border crossing, I leave some parts of me behind. And at every new place I arrive, they take a bit away from me.

One can gauge how much they want you there by their reception of you. When I arrived in the Netherlands, I was enrolled as a master student and I was paying tuition. We were told to report to a hall at a certain date and time with all the necessary documents. All of us engineering students went through a sort of speed dating with all the services. The banks, the health insurance, the government, dorms, cellphone and internet providers and so on, set up booths in neat rows to process us right there and then. They had already figured out our unique situation (for example, needing a bank account without having a Dutch address) and the process went so smoothly that I felt almost rushed.

When I arrived in Switzerland as a PhD student, things got a bit more complicated as I was actually going to get paid as an employee. But at every stage, whenever I was told “no you need this first”, the person sitting across the desk were unfailingly knowledgable about exactly what I needed and where I needed to go to get what I needed. And they had to endure me starting every conversation with “Do you speak English?” in English.

Neither of these two countries were heavy with immigrants coming from outside of the EU. They simply weren’t immigrant-based countries like the US or Canada. I went to the US to work once before. It was a summer stint at Caltech. The processing was so last minute that I didn’t know whether I would make it at all. This experience is shared with every “alien” I know that tried to get into the US to do research. It is also shared with all the international students I am hiring.

Now comes my most recent move to the US, another decade has since passed. Now given that I had made it before, and people I know also experienced the exact same situation every time, I knew we would most likely make it. But we forget the stress and the mental toll this takes everytime, how the process (intentionally or not) scars and nearly breaks us.

Moving to the US this time has been the single most painful experience in recent memory. At every turn, it seemed that obstacles were erected just to spite me, and mis-informations spread just to confuse me. Essentially someone or something out there was making it as hard as possible for me to feel welcome. I know that sounded like some tin-foil hat conspiracy, so it must be that people were just so indifferent to it all, so perfunctory. At points I wanted to give up and just leave but I do what I do now just to show them that resistance is futile, and that I will prevail in emerging from this cesspool of metaphorical shit. I will surely prevail, but just as surely, I will have a bad taste left in my mouth of everyone and everything in this process. I know this will have a long term effect on my psyche. It is hard not to be cynical or bitter, it is hard to be hopeful and optimistic. It’s hard to be emphatic to others’ plight and their misfortune. It’s hard to have that capacity, after really having to internalize it all. We can do better, we can be more welcoming. We can improve.

The trouble started with getting a visa to enter. My employing institution and its staff members were not sure if I actually needed a visa, or what the differences were between a visa and the H1B status. As a consequence, I was in my hotel room (during a much-needed vacation between my post-doc and my new post) calling the embassy trying to schedule an urgent visa interview appointment. After paying for it, I found out that as a Canadian, I didn’t need the visa.

After arriving in the States, getting paid proved impossible without a Social Security Number (this it turned out, not to even be true). As to how to actually go about getting such a number, no one could tell me. On campus, I was sent around in a literal 3 way circle before I gave up and went directly to the Social Security office. I was told things that simply weren’t true. I was assisted by helpful people who did not know the answer or didn’t even know why I had the question I had. I interacted with people who did not appear the least bit bothered by my plight, and those who paid lip service after the fact. I talked to straight-out xenophobes who expressed delight at making my life as miserable as possible.

I did this not once, but twice, going to an appointment to apply for a very important piece of document (SSN number, drivers license), only to be told that I am missing something (digital copies clearly do not count). I had to then go to a random print shop to print it out (by walking for half an hour under the 30 degree sun), and returning with the document they needed. They were always surprised that I actually went back and did so that quickly.

There were some knowledgeable people, a small minority of them. They were invariably the most friendly, accommodating and efficient. The majority though, were pencil-pushers being indignant when being pointed out that they cannot even push pencils.

In retrospect, it would be quite easy for me to advice another European person coming here exactly what to do. But maybe, they would still go through the gut-wrenching pain regardless. Like the migrants arriving at Ellis Island, this is not supposed to be easy. The privilege of being in the US has to be earned, and every step of the way, this privilege can be easily taken away.

Writing this has been cathartic.

When in a debate or an argument, I find myself often resorting to extrapolation. I point out the flaw in the other person’s train of thought by taking what they say to the extreme. Needlessly to say, this is a cheap trick that I play, and it is logically flawed in many situations. Having said that, I will apply the same reasoning to the abortion debate. I discount arguments that cannot be quantified, e.g. a person’s conviction that abortion is not allowed by the dictates of the spaghetti monster, and focus solely on the rational arguments put forth by both the pro-choice and pro-life side. Note that since the Supreme Court ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson, things have changed quite a bit, for the worse.

Life starts at conception. Wikipedia states that a living thing must demonstrate the ability to signal, and the ability to self-sustain. Given that living cells can always signal, we look at if, and at what stage can an embryo self-sustain. It is obvious that an infant can’t be self-sustainable, we reduce that requirement to viability. If, by the miracle of science, an embryo is viable immediately after conception, then should all termination be barred? Should women be allowed to abort, and have that viable embryo reach maturity in a futuristic incubation chamber? What if the cost of this procedure is prohibitive? Will there be a “recreational” use of it, where the woman wants a child but doesn’t want to go through the pregnancy? While this may satisfy the fundamentalists since no babies will be killed, it would place a huge burden on the society, to care for basically all these orphans.

The benefits of proposing an explicit gender balance outweighs the negatives. I would state it as a “at minimum, X% of the governing body must be from either genders.” with X being somewhere in the 30% to 40% range. I assume that in a functioning society, there should be no lack of qualified candidates from all socio-economic backgrounds. However, it will probably take more time to find these candidates from more disenfranchised or marginalized groups, at least for the time being. This is true for all positions, public or private, NGOs or start-ups. So, unless the argument is “we admit that we do not have the resources to dig around, and we will simply hire the first person coming out of Harvard” (which is a valid but not very palatable one), there is no reason to stop looking. Once this becomes the accepted norm, then we will reap all the benefits without all the inane quibble over fairness.

I made several mistakes spending the discretionary fund. At the start of my time here, I didn’t have a PhD student. To get the ball rolling, I hired a number of undergrads and graduate students to start on some of the projects I envisioned. It was immediately obvious that there was a large mismatch in what I expect, and what they are capable of doing. I still have not fully figured out why that is. From my side, I expected the students to appreciate the problem that we try to tackle, and think independently on ways to solve such a problem. From interacting with a number of students, I learnt somethings. Among the student body, there is a general lack of basic knowledge on how to function as a professional employee. Things ranging from 1) showing up to work on time, 2) making and sticking to appointments, 3) being responsible, 4) answering questions, 5) knowing what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t.

I have started becoming more explicit in asking for what I want, and I phrase these in very direct terms. Come to think of it, I was the same in my undergrad, there just wasn’t much independent thinking going on. To know that a 40 hour work week means that one is expected to be present for that time, and to take a leave of absence requires some permission. I feel silly even writing this. As I write this, I started drafting a handbook for my lab. The whole idea of seeing handbook to tell someone how to do their job seems wrong somehow but here I am, looking up examples of how other labs run.

With the new batch of undergrads I have hired, things have gotten a lot more effective. One change in recruitment policy I made was, that I only hired students who were at the top of my class. I mean, top 5 out of 100.

As the next cohort of newly minted assistant professors draft plans to uproot their lives (yet again) to a distant land, I hope to shed some lights on this opaque and intentionally difficult process. I suppose my own journey was unique, but then again, by the point a person becomes a faculty member, their journeys are probably no less unique. What follows are the experiences of a Chinese-born Canadian national emigrating to the US from Switzerland, to take up a post in a publicly funded institution of higher learning.

As I was going through (a couple of years ago), I noticed that somehow, even when everyone had to go through the exact same thing, no one bothered to write them down. So I started to write them down. There were a lot of things that needed to be done. These were not really hard things, but the bureaucracy made them difficult. This difficulty increased exponentially as 1) I wasn’t physically in the US, and 2) covid was raging on.

As I was going through this process, I realized that my situation was unique. Most academics by this point have already had US-based something. As such, none of the staff members in my department knew anything about what I needed to do.

Cash reserve One advice is to have a boat load of cash reserve. I am not being flippant about this, and I know amassing about 20k is not easy by any means but that was approximately how much I spent. Much of it I eventually recuperated but life would have been much harder without the ability to pay for things myself and get reimbursed later.

Moving + cleaning the old apartment cost about $8,000. The plane ticket and the airbnb stay for 2 weeks cost about $2,000. The initial deposit for an apartment cost 2 months rent (since I didn’t have a SSN number), which was $4,000 (including utilities and so on). Rest of the fund was spent on 1) renting a car for a month, 2) down payment of my own car, 3) furnishing my apartment and my office, 4) buying lab supplies to do the first experiments for the projects I was still involved with, and 5) miscellaneous things. I was fortunate that the Swiss government returned all my retirement funds when I notified them that I was leaving the country. They couldn’t wait to get rid of me!

Moving The moving companies recommended by my university (UH) did not know how to move internationally. The moving company I hired in Switzerland (where I did my post-doc) could not figure out how to fill out the byzantine “foreign vendor” forms of the US. I ended up paying the entire moving cost myself. When I eventually got the money back, it was taxed heavily as added income. This was eventually returned in the next tax cycle. The movers were quite professional. As they were a Swiss company, they contracted a US counter-part to move the stuff from some container ships to my new flat about 3 months later.

Getting paid As a foreign person, it was difficult to get my pay directly transferred to my bank account since I did not have a US-based bank account. They offered to cut me a cheque (fun fact, cheques are not a thing in Europe anymore) that I cannot actually deposit without a US bank account. My workaround, and this is pretty cool, was to get an international bank account (Wise). Such an account gives me an American bank branch address along with the routing number and account number for ACH. I am still using Wise as my bank account, and I did not intend to change that. Update, I had to get a Chase account because I could not deposit cash to Wise.

Cellphone This was not too difficult. I got my plan from Mint, they deliver e-sims so it took 5 minutes to get it activated on my phone.

Tax exemption This should apply to everything we order for work, from anywhere / anyone in Texas. I asked the finance department for a tax exempt notice, and I brought the notice with me everytime I bought anything for work, either physically in a shop, or online. Major retailers (Bestbuy, Home Depot and Amazon) had a system which allowed me to upload the form and get a tax exemption ID that I can tell the cashiers. Apple looked at my exemption form and removed the tax. Professional online stores expect such a form. Amazon had a portal where I could upload the form, and it took about 3 days for them to verify. If by some reason a retailer refuse to remove the tax, document this and then the accounting department will reimburse the full amount. Failure to show this documentation and I would have to pay the tax myself.

Getting SSN number This was one of the most headachy process I have ever gone through. Compounded by COVID, and the process made me want to quit before I was 2 months in. To compound the pain, I was informed that I couldn’t be paid without a SSN. This turned out not to be true.

Entering the country With a Canadian passport, the I-797 was sufficient for entry. Photocopies of the I-797 along with the I-94 (which I print out from the website) was sufficient for re-entry. Note, as a Canadian, no visa is needed.

Apartment Without an SSN number or credit history, I was asked to pay 2 months rent as a deposit that I will get back at the end of my tenancy. To pay the deposit, I needed to enable ACH transfer from Wise, so they deposited two small amounts (less than a dollar) to my account to verify that it was indeed my account. Then I could just authorize them to take the money.

Renter insurance This came with the apartment (minimum 300k). I paid about 15 a month for it. I was automatically enrolled.

Electricity This needed to be ordered separately, and was around 10c per kWh. Fix rate was necessary in case a vast over-demand occurs (for example, during a storm).

Driver’s license A Texas driver’s license was trivial to get as I had a Canadian driver’s license. No tests were needed, I just had to pay a small fee and received the temporary license immediately. They officially took away my Canadian license, but I ordered a replacement right away. Now I have driver’s licenses from three countries.

Getting a car The car market was very strange back in those days. In Houston, I needed a car to get just about anywhere. The online shops such as Carmax and Carvana wouldn’t sell a car to me without a Texas driver’s license, and I couldn’t get a license without a Social Security Number.

This is part II of the “how not to buy a house in a week” trilogy. Read part I first.

Day 8

The morning of, we wrote down a detailed list of things that needed fixing, the approximate cost of fixing these things, provided references for each items. Feeling pretty confident with the number, we went and met our agent in his apartment to go through the list and draft an email to the sellers asking for money.

There are several items that were clearcut, things like 1) the water boiler is long expired (5 years beyond the intended 10 years usage) and needs to be replaced, 2) some ceiling insulation is missing (as shown on a infrared camera), 3) wall outlets that do not have a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) near the kitchen / bathroom / garage. There were other things that were hazardous, 1) the wooden canopy on the terrace is rotting away, 2) the fence in the driveway is about to fall down, 3) the faucet in the master bathtub output brown water. Then there are things that are questionable, hairline cracks, incorrect electrical box arrangement, and so on.

We added up the items that we thought were necessary, and asked for around $15k. Later that day, we got a passive aggressive email that threw our list of demand into the bin. We went back and forth a bit and got around $3k in reimbursements. Looking back at it, I do not know how we could have extracted more.

Day 9

The inspector suggested that someone trim the hedge around the electric box where the main power supply line from the street goes into the house so he could see the wiring without being electrocuted. The owners relented after some grumbling. Somehow, the husband fell when he was doing this, and had to get stitches on his face. That stopped the trimming, but the inspector was kind enough to visit the property again to check out that box.

Day 10

We engaged two different mortgage lenders to get quotes and rates. Since I had, at that point, lived in the States for less than 2 years, nothing worked. The lenders asked for every single minuscule detail of my financial background. Fortunately, my credit rating was just sufficient to get something. And with the promise of a massive (36%) down payment, they agreed to extend me a loan for the remainder (~$300,000) at a rate of 4.875% over 15 years.

This rate was already about 2% higher than January, a mere 4 months ago, and now (July) it’s around 5.25%.

Day 12

With that, the get-out-the-deal time period elapsed and we were in it for good.

Day 14

My aunt, through my dad, asked me if we needed money. The answer was, clearly, yes we needed money. She was willing to lend us a supplementary amount (~$230,000) at a 4% rate over 15 years. The actual operation of money transfer took some tricky banking operations and a trip back to Canada.

Day 16

I hadn’t been back to Canada since January of 2019. 2 and three years later, after a brief stint in the States, I’ve come to appreciate how nice Canada was. After landing at Toronto Pearson, I went directly to the bank. This was an extra-ordinary behavior on my part, since I always make a bee-line to a near by Tim Hortons. I needed this wire transfer to go through, and banks get very difficult when such a large amount is transferred internationally.

Day 18

As a part of the mortgage lending process. The appraisal came back with a number lower than our offer. This was a disappointment, since we wanted to see the house being more worthy than the amount we are offering. Though, it did seem like a blessing in disguise since now the mortgage lender could potentially back out of the deal, and we then would have no choice but to back out of the offer. We were within the 21 days and there would be no penalty (except the options fee). Armed with this we asked the sellers to reduce the total by $5,661, surprisingly they obliged. This was interesting, because this is one of the few opportunities we get to back out of the deal after the options period. We may have been able to ask for more, since this far in, the sellers are invested in making it through.

Day 36

The mortgage calculation (U.S. specific) follows a simple set of equations. The calculation ensures that the lenders pays the exact same amount every month in the entire loan period. The payment per month c can be calculated using the following equation, note that this will be the monthly payment through the entire loan period.

Where P is the principle (the amount of loan we got), r is the annual interest rate, n is the number of payments per year (in our case, it is 12), and t is the loan terms in years. The available terms are 5 years, 10 years, 15 years and 30 years. The yearly rate is largely dictated by the federal treasury or the federal reserve, or the federal bank, or some other people. In Excel, this function is called “PMT”. It calculates the payment for a loan based on constant payments and a constant interest rate. The derivation is given in Wikipedia, and it includes a nifty use of geometric series.

Given c, we can calculate the total balance at the beginning of each month, which is simply the previously balance minus c. With that total balance, we can calculate the monthly interest, by multiplying the total balance by r / n. If we subtract c by this monthly interest, we will see how much of the principle we are actually paying off. There are many excel sheets online that you can download to do this calculation for you, but it is always instructive to know how these numbers are gotten. This should be, and was, the exact same amount as what we were given in the Closing Disclosure (CD).

For some historical reasons (i.e. the recession of 2008), the U.S. mortgage market became quite heavily regulated. The background checks are quite stringent and the lender has quite some leverage. Things like 15 or 30 year fixed rates are unheard-of in Canada for example. The ability to overpay as much as one wants without penalty is also a benefit that significantly cuts down the total interest payments as we will see below.

The first two plots show our actual loan calculation for a 15 year term without any added monthly payments. In the plot below to the left, the initial payments mostly directed towards the incurred interests, and the latter payments mostly into the principle loan amount. Note that in the first months. half of the monthly payments go towards interest. The plot on the right shows the decrease of the principle amount w.r.t. time, and the incurred total interest.

Now, if we pay $52,500 in the first month instead of the actual monthly bill of ~$2,500, we cut down the total interest payment (by the conclusion of the loan) by $42,000. We also reduce the total loan term by about 5 years. The following two plots show this.

Day 37

The Closing Disclosure (CD) was a document that the mortgage lender sent us many times over. They generated a new one every time numbers change, and force us to sign them online again and again. It was another one of those documents with a simple set of calculations (adding and subtracting) that was made out to be super complex. We made an excel sheet to ensure their calculations were correct. The lender did make mistakes, and it took my multiple harassing emails and calls to ensure they got the numbers right. I don’t know if that was the normal practice and they were just slowly converging to the right numbers, or they were actually incompetent. It was critical to ensure whatever was on the offer letter gets translated to this document, down to the last dollar.

The first page contained all the important quantities including the loan amount (P), the interest rate (r), the monthly payment (c), the projected payments including property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and HOA dues. I was asked if I wanted to engage with an escrow to pay these projected payments on my behalf. I assume that the mortgage lender would charge me to maintain this escrow, and didn’t find any sense in that. The first page also contained the closing costs and cash to close. The first number contains all the fees the various agencies charged the buyer (us), the second was the amount we had to pay at closing. For our CD, the following items were non-standard and had to be rectified at one point.

• The actual amount of down-payment. This, and not the percentage, matters.
• Title insurance was to be paid by the seller
• Home insurance was paid in advance (for a year) separately
• Seller gave a credit
• Appraisal was pre-paid
• The actual earnest money that was pre-paid

Day 39

This was the original date of closing on the offer letter. The mortgage lender had major difficulties with verifying my income from EPFL. We had to reschedule. We were at risk of losing the earnest money, which amounted to about $25,000. A lot of anxious and panic ridden calls to all parties and haranguing them to get their act together.

Day 40

I drove to the title company and signed a stack of documents. That ended this process, and the house was officially ours. It felt anticlimactic since we didn’t physically receive anything. This may not be of much practical value, but I don’t know what we actually bought. I don’t know how much of the “worth” of the house is that plot of land, or the structure on top of that land. I don’t if there can be challenges to the ownership of the land.

I would say that, just like everything else in US bureaucracy or in bureaucracy in general, any deviations from the standard operating procedure created a huge amount of headache. While it would seem that the stack of documents 100 pages thick would be complicated, but the opposite was true. 90% of that could pertain to the purchase of literally any house at all.

Day >40

With the purchase of this house, we automatically became landlords to the tenants currently living in our house. With that the trilogy of two parts end.

This occurred between April 16, 2022 and May 20, 2022. In a span of one month and 4 days, we went from seeing the house on Zillow to signing the closing documents. The following is an account of what transpired between those two dates. It goes without saying that the experience is anecdotal and has no statistical relevance. This was a week after my lab got furnished.

Day 0

We were on a FaceTime call, and causally browsing through real estate properties currently available on the market. This being the digital age, she was looking at Houston properties on Zillow while being physically in London. We were sending links to places we liked back and forth. These properties ranged from shacks that cost next to nothing, to mansions that we cannot afford in a million years. We were just spitballing on a lazy Saturday afternoon as people do. There was no firm budget in mind (somewhere south of $600,000 would have been acceptable, we thought), and we had no idea how much mortgage we were able to get. We didn’t even think we wanted to buy a place. Even worse, we didn’t even know if Houston was the city we should be buying a property. I was just as much eying properties on rightmove.co.uk for 1 bedroom apartments in London that cost as much as a whole Houstonian house.

This went on for several rounds before we somehow converged on a red house. It was a detached house built with a townhouse style. Located in north midtown with 3 floors and a terrace facing the cityscape of Houston. For whatever reason, the stucco façade of the place was painted a burgundy color. In a sea of gently colored palette of the neighborhood, this house stood out from a mile away. The interior seemed lovely and spacious to a fault. The ceiling of the second floor was so high it looked as if someone did non-uniform scaling to the place only in the z-direction. So we thought, okay, let’s go see the place. I entered the little bits of information on Zillow, and sure enough, I got a call minutes later by a buyer’s agent asking if I wanted a tour. “Sure! How’s Monday?” I replied thinking, what’s the worst that can happen?

Day 2

I drove to the place during work for a tour. After parking the car, I walked up to the property and immediately realized how massive of a building it was. This will make me sound like an awful engineer, but I never thought to visualize the height of a building until I stood at its foundation. I had to strain my neck to look up at its terrace, which seemed like it was 5 storeys up. It was physically imposing! I had to collect my emotions of “who am I to entertain owning a place like this?!” and pretend I am a smart guy who has been viewing houses for a while. Armed with my non-existing knowledge, and no pre-approval of mortgage of any kind, I shook hands with the agent and walked through the front door. He was a pleasant enough guy who seemed very laid back and chill. He let me walk up and down, and answered any questions I had. It was a beautiful place, and very cutely decorated. Then again, I have literally zero reference points to compare with. This was the only house I viewed.

Day 3

We talked, and talked, and seriously considered putting in an offer. At the same time, a mortgage lender contacted me through Zillow and offered to calculate a mortgage pre-approval for us. Since we had no idea what our financial status was, and my credit score was close to abysmal, we said yes to a 20% downpayment, to roughly a 5% fixed interest rate over a 30 year term. This took no time, and we received the pre-approval the same day. At this point, I felt like I was on auto-pilot, watching the process play out like a disinterested party. The numbers seemed abstract, and the house seemed like a problem set that I had to do.

In retrospect, this pre-approval was almost entirely artificial. The numbers on it meant next to nothing and could (and did) change drastically. Just like the mass-mailed pre-approvals to credit cards, this mortgage pre-approval was little more than an advertisement.

At the urging of the agent, we put an offer down. According to the seller’s agent, there were multiple offers on the table (2 to be exact, one being a cash offer). He was pressuring my agent, whom in turn pressured me to put in an offer that evening. We added $15,000 to the listing price in the offer. In addition, we wrote a personal letter to the sellers, trying to appeal to their humanity. We increased our earnest money to $24,100 (from $0), and the options fee to $500 (from $100). Lastly, we reduced the options period to 7 days (from 10). The earnest money was to show that we were serious about this offer, and we would lose this amount if we cancelled our offer without cause between 7 days and closing. The options fee was the fee to have the option of cancelling the offer within the first 7 days.

In retrospect, this urgency was likely artificial. While it may be true that they may have gone for the other offers, from a dispassionate perspective, there are other fishes in the sea. The chance that any particular house is significantly undervalued is next to none.

I note that increasing the earnest money was easy (and doesn’t change anything) if everything goes smoothly, and if we have that money. The options fee should have been kept lower if we were putting multiple offers simultaneously. The options period of 7 days was not too big of an issue.

Day 4

While the seller’s agent promised to make a decision by the morning, they were radio silent until late night. From our end, we re-toured the place, partly over FaceTime. Late evening of that day, the seller’s agent asked my agent a cryptic question. My agent sent me a screenshot of the conversation, which said “Are you all resubmitting”.

Now, I understand that the seller’s agent’s only job was to get the sellers as much money as possible, but this was just pure evil. Given that there was no reason why they would not have accepted a higher bid already, logically there were two possibilities,

• The other offers were lower, but the sellers want to squeeze more money out of us.
• The other offers were comparable and they asked the same questions to all parties.

This was then that having a precise budget in mind would have helped. But since we didn’t, we added $2,000 based on pure heuristics. In retrospect, I believe the other offers were lower.

Day 5

My agent called me up asking “do you have a backup house you want to look at?” to which I answer “no”. Being a cheeky guy he was, he said “great, you got the house.” This was when I thought all hell would break loose. We had a 7 day window to either back out of the offer or the house was ours.

I contacted a title company, which as far as I can tell, does two things. One, they provide the title insurance and two they act as an escrow. In the capacity as an escrow, they hold all the money until everything is settled, then distribute that money. Following the acceptance of our offer, we transferred the options fee + the earnest money to the title company. Yes, we needed to gather about $25,000 dollars on the spot.

I contacted a home inspector to evaluate the house and to note down any deficiencies. This guy cost around 550 dollars for about 3 to 4 hours of work.

Day 6

My partner came to Houston, I practically broke down. One never realize the amount of stress that had been accumulating until there’s an outlet.

Day 7

We met with the inspector at the property, and patiently walked with him throughout the house. It took 3 to 4 hours in total. I trailed his steps and noted down as much as I could. He started in the kitchen and did it floor by floor. He even had a drone to inspect the metal roof. Later that day I received a long and detailed report that noted all the things that may or may not be wrong with the house. Because there was no destructive testing, we can’t really ever know. So what it amounted to were two things,

1. He was reasonably sure that nothing was majorly wrong with the house. As in, nothing was so bad that we should back out of the offer.
2. He gave us enough ammunition to demand money for things that may or may not need fixing. These items were buried under veils of code violations.