Black Ink Only

Ohh the wonder, the unbridled joy that is filling in a mortgage application.

For starters I’m having to fill in a paper form, PAPER AND PEN, and with it being a joint mortgage I’m having to fill in everything twice. Sort of…

You see the real bug bear with these things, is the lack of distinct instruction. Some parts of the form, personal details, employment details and whatnot, are split into two columns, one for me and one for Louise. Yet the ‘address’ section requires me to write out our address twice, as does the contact details, age of property, rooms etc etc. In the past, on other forms of a financial nature, I’ve put “see spouse” only to have the form returned as incomplete.

And what of the myriad of questions about being self-employed, dependants and so on. The initial instruction says EVERY question should be answered, but there is no indication of optional questions. So I tick “NO” when asked about dependants but the question after it which asks “Are any dependants over 18” doesn’t have any indication that we don’t need to answer it depending on our answer to the previous question (if you know that I mean). Now it’s obvious to you me, we have no dependants so by definition we can’t have any that are over 18, but I’ve dealt with the anally-retentive, detail obsessed morons who process this kind of paperwork before and I’m not taking any risks.

So, resigned to my fate, I start filling in the form, completing the easy stuff before delving into our paperwork to retrieve current mortgage details, account numbers and so on. So far so good. I turn the page and am confronted with one column into which I need to put details of the property we are wanting to get the mortgage for… except we are re-mortgaging and.. well obviously all the details are the same as the previous page (on which, remember, they are listed twice) but I write them out a third time anyway.

And so it continues, details of existing financial commitments, details of jobs, previous jobs, previous abodes, dog’s name, whether we have a goldfish named “goldie” and so on and on and on and on… I know that a lot of the information is needed and that checks have to be made and yadda yadda yadda… but OHH MY GOD they could make the forms a little easier to complete.

Now, what the hell is my national insurance number…