When buying a new home, it is standard practice to put an earnest deposit down to show the seller that you are serious.

What happens if your situation changes through no fault of your home and you no longer want to move forward with the purchase?

That is the situation the couple in this story found themselves, but they figured out a way to make it work in their favor.

Check it out.

We won’t get our earnest back? Fine, we won’t be able to satisfy requirements for closing.

My wife and I decided to finally purchase a home in Southern California – A brand new, decked out 4 bedroom home that really felt like something we didn’t deserve.

Pretty standard so far.

We gave in an earnest deposit of $10k towards an escrow account which would then go into the closing costs.

The closing period we requested was Mid September.

Terrible timing!

Meanwhile, my wife’s employer informed her that her team may go through some corporate restructuring and she may be axed.

Nothing big, it happens in her industry at times, with all likelihood that she would simply transfer to another team.

However, what makes our situation tricky is that we are on a work visa.

Which means finding another job and filing legal paperwork can be very dicey.

With this development, and our general desire to seek out better opportunities abroad, we were getting nervous about this commitment.

A pretty reasonable request, especially with so much time before the closing.

We informed the builder and their lender that we are contemplating cancelling the loan because of this situation and we would like our earnest deposit.

We never assumed it will be easy, but were hopeful someone would hear us out.

We immediately got told by the sales agent that since our deposit has been in escrow for more than 30 days, and since we have a conditional loan approval, we won’t get our deposit back.

That does seem odd.

The lender was very understanding but for some reason was anxious to have us cancel the loan and said that he would be happy to work with me on future loans.

I was a bit suspect since he was the builder’s lender, he would always back the builder.

I told him to hold off, since I didn’t want to cancel before I fight to get my deposit back.

We requested the sales agent to reconsider and talk to her superiors, even offering to mediate a call between my wife’s manager and them to understand the impact.

The seller was under the opinion that unless she gets a pink slip, we don’t qualify to get our money back.

We started panicking but looked through the purchase agreement where we found a clause that if we failed to get financing, the buyer (us) is eligible for a refund.

When a few back and forth emails didn’t help, the seller agent simply asked if we would like to sign the cancellation agreement.

The date was July 31st. Closing was a bit more than 45 days away.

I realized, that while we would fight tooth and nail, our worst case scenario is we lose $10k.

Whether it is on July 31st or we lose during Closing, it is the same to us.

So that’s why they wanted to cancel right away.

However, if we keep the agreement ON without cancelling, only for us to fail at closing, the seller can’t find another buyer despite knowing that we won’t be closing.

I emailed her saying that we are confident that we won’t meet financing which is requirement for maintenance of escrow during closing, but we desire to continue with the closing date of Mid September and not cancel.

This means, worst case we lose $10k in September.

Worst case for the seller?

They can’t find another buyer till then.

We immediately (within 10 minutes) got told that we are getting our deposit back!

We were ecstatic!

We felt sorry that we weren’t able to close on our home, but we didn’t want to be in a bad loan and put everyone else under stress.

Sometimes you have to find those loopholes to force people to do the right thing.

Take a look at some of the comments on this story to learn even more.

That’s why people get help from lawyers and realtors.

Yeah, they got lucky on their contract.

Who can afford to live out there?

Yeah, that is a massive earnest deposit.

Absolutely, 100% greed.

It is rare to see a story where someone one-up’s a lender!

Home-buying is not for the weak.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.