Abstract

I am currently in the process of getting everything arranged for the loan to replace the greenhouse with a new Morton building.

If you have been following me since I started this blog in anticipation of purchasing the farm that surrounded my acreage, it’s starting to remind me of that.  Kind of. Only worse.

I should have known it wouldn’t just be easy, but it’s kind of to the point of being a little more difficult than it really ought to be.

I have two loans for the farm–one through Farm Credit Services (FCS) and one through the Farm Services Agency (FSA).  The one with the FSA is a government subsidized loan, so it has a really low interest rate.

But now that I want to take out an additional loan, they are telling me I have to pay them off and wrap that amount into my new loan through FCS.

That’s not a big deal.  I plan on the farm being completely paid off within a couple of years anyhow–after fifteen years (instead of twenty and thirty years).

Well, because of this change, it means they have to update the abstract and get a new appraisal of the farm.  That should not be a big deal, but I got an e-mail asking for me to drop off the abstract so they could get the process going.

I don’t have the abstract.  When I signed papers with the FSA thirteen years ago, they required that I leave the abstract with them.

I was told it would be locked in the safe at the lawyer’s office where we met for the closing on the farm.  I told the loan officer from FCS that the FSA kept it, and the reply from the current loan officer at the FSA was that they don’t hold abstracts.

I politely disagreed and then I did a quick Google search of lawyers in the town.  I found a name I recognized, but I knew it wasn’t the name of the office.  I clicked on the link and read about their merger with another office (two actually), and I immediately recognized the name of the pre-merger firm.  So I sent that to her as well.

This is a bit disconcerting.  It makes me wonder how many abstracts are sitting in a box in the safe of a lawyer downtown that the FSA doesn’t know about.

But the FCS loan officer was great.  She called the lawyer’s office Friday morning.

After waiting through the weekend and the first half of the week, I finally got word on Wednesday that the lawyer found my abstract! I kinda want to make the FSA officer eat crow, but I’ll take the high road.  Although, I really think someone ought to let them know they really need to have a conversation with the lawyer to see how many more abstracts are sitting there.  If I hadn’t remembered the name of their lawyer from thirteen years ago, we’d have had to have a new abstract drawn up.

I hope you enjoyed the abstract photography from around the farm to go with the post on the farm’s abstract.