After yet another delay, I’m back with a new update on what’s going on with me

At the end of last week, I had two major milestones in my time at Atlanta and at McK. The first one is a big one…I returned to the office to find that my box of business cards had been delivered!!! I know y’all might not think that’s a big deal, but it was pretty major to me…here’s why. During my first four weeks of work, I’ve been meeting a lot of people around ATL and, as we’re exchanging pleasantries, I will tell them where i work. At the end of the convos, the other person almost always asks me for a business card and I always end up having to say that I hadn’t gotten them yet. That response from me always draws a strange “Hmmmm…do you really work at McKinsey?” look from the other person. I guess the lack of business cards along with the fact that I look like I’m 15 could make someone skeptical of me. So, now I feel 100% official. I’ve got my staffing assignment on the road (so I can call myself a road warrior and pick up some frequent flier miles), my blackberry (so I can be “leashed” and accessible whenever folks at work want to hit me up), and my business cards (so I can hand them out whenever someone asks for one and I can deliver it with a loud “BLAKOW!!!!” yell). As you can tell, I’m really having fun with this whole “returning to Real World” thing

And, as if the news about the business cards wasn’t enough, I also finally found my way out of my janky condo rental situation on Friday. I closed on my new townhouse that afternoon, but it didn’t go without incident. The closing was scheduled to happen on Friday afternoon at 4pm and, because of the expedited nature of my mortgage application process, I wasn’t sure if everything would go through in time for me to make it to that date. On Thursday, I got the good word that I’d been approved and I thought it was smooth sailing from there. That changed on Friday morning when my mortgage guy informed me that the loan packages hadn’t come in from my lenders yet and we might have to push the closing back if they didn’t arrive on time…and I likely would have had to pay my landlord another month’s rent I’m telling ya…I’ve never crossed my fingers so hard in my life and, fortunately, I got the call a couple hours before the closing that all my docs had come in and I was good to go for the closing.

At 4pm, I arrived at the closing attorney’s office and assumed that the process would take about 20-30 minutes…WRONG!!! When the attorney brought in the paperwork, the seller’s agent was alarmed to find out that his client would have to pay $900+ at the closing to sell the place…i.e. she was going to have to pay to sell her house to me and would be getting no profit. The seller’s mother (who had come in to sign in her place) and the agent immediately started buggin’ out and frantically making phone calls to figure out what was going on. All along, I’m sitting in a conference room with my agent, my mortgage guy, and the loan guy from his office on the verge of either passing out from bad nerves or going “postal”. My mortgage guy told me that the seller could have just chosen to walk away at that point because of the drama behind it all and I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I just couldn’t believe that I’d worked so hard to make sure my own stuff was straight going into the process and that I might not get my house because the seller wasn’t on point with hers. Even worse, I faced the prospect of having to go through the whole house hunting saga again. It turns out the seller had a prepayment penalty on their mortgage and didn’t know it and the penalty took them from making a profit on their house to having to take a loss that day. Fortunately for her, the nature of the prepayment penalty was that the lender would review the transaction later and refund her money if a sale had occurred (instead of a refinance). The mother was able to front the funds needed for the closing to proceed and I had the keys to the house in hand about 3 hours after the closing had begun. The process was stressful and was not the sort of thing I expected to be doing less than two months into my time in ATL, I’m glad that my bootleg landlord “forced” me to make this move. Whew, I really dodged a bullet with that one and now it’s all good for The Kid.

For those of you who are thinking of buying a home sometime soon, please make sure to read all of the documents that your lender asks you to sign. They’ll probably try to talk you through it quickly to get your signature, but it’s your right to have everything explained and it would keep you from some of the problems like the one my seller ran into at the closing. I’m glad that I had a good mortgage guy because it is pretty easy for a person to be taken to the cleaners on that sort of deal if they don’t know what they’re doing.

I can finally say that the door is closed on this drama because I was able to get the landlord to sign an agreement to terminate the lease, which keeps her from being able to come back at me later on and try to sue me for the 4 months of rent that I’ll be avoiding by moving out. If she ever did sue me, I know she’d lose, but the nuisance of it all would be worse than actually having to pay her because of the hectic travel schedule that I’ll have going forward. It turns out that the landlord is going to sell the condo and I pray that the person who buys it can see through her professional facade and get to the inner jankiness that is there. Dang, I’m glad that I don’t have to go back there when I fly home tomorrow.

I swear I always end up being the guy who has improbable things like this happen to him. Everything is golden with the living situation now. I moved all of my stuff out of the condo on Saturday and Sunday and now I’ve just got to buy some furniture, unpack a bunch of boxes and suitcases, and get cable and my house will become “home”. It feels good to be a homeowner again, but it feels even better to be able to rest in my own home without worrying about having to knock on a front window for security to let me into a building or risking getting knocked over the head by a crackhead as I walk the 2 blocks up the street to the garage where I had to park my car. Just remember what I said in an earlier entry…be really careful when it comes to walking into a rental situation or else you might be dragged through some drama like I was.

That’s all for now. My next entry(-ies) should be pretty interesting because the National Black MBA Association Conference is going down this weekend in ATL and I plan on being in the thick of things helping McK to recruit, catching up with my friends from the GSB and other schools, and throwing a “mixer” with a couple of my coworkers to give some of the conference attendees a chance to kick it without the spectre of company recruiters looming over them. Then, I’ll be flying out to Palo Alto on Sunday to help with some of the recruiting efforts for the GSB Class of 2007. It’ll be nice to go back and visit, but it could also be strange to be on the other side trying to recruit folks. Hopefully, I’ll have some good things to write about in a few days.

Oh yeah, one more thing before I go…I’ve got to give a big shout out to a couple of people who helped me in a major way in the last couple of weeks. The first one is my real estate agent. Her name is Kim W. and she works at Dwellings Real Estate’s Decatur, GA office. She’s a really personable young woman and she will fight hard to get you a good deal on a nice place. There’s no way I could have found my house if it weren’t for her. The second person is Jeff C. who is my mortgage broker. Jeff works for an ATL-based mortgage firm called Stellar Mortgage and he’s a champ. That man worked his butt off to take me from the stage of putting a contract on my house to having the closing in only 13 days…that’s amazing!!! If any of you are in the Atlanta area or are moving there, feel free to hit either of these folks up for help. They did so well for me that I want to make sure the public knows how great they are at what they do.