Endless red tape

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

You’ve all heard the phrase “cut through all the red tape” before. Red tape is an idiom referring to regulations or conformity to formal rules or standards which are claimed to be excessive, rigid or redundant, or to bureaucracy claimed to hinder or prevent action or decision-making. It is usually applied to governments, corporations, and other large organizations.

The phrase has apparently been around for hundreds of years and dates back to the way the government of the Holy Roman Empire functioned and has since become a common shortcut for describing how getting any simple task becomes more complicated by the various hoops one has to jump through to get said task taken care of.

There are a lot of examples of this, like getting a new car registered, getting registered for college, getting a book published,

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doing your taxes, that sort of thing.

I recently had to deal with a bunch of red tape as my wife and I decided to refinance our mortgage. Interest rates were down, we had a bunch of equity built up and we wanted to roll some higher-interest debt into a single montly payment.

It wasn’t even really our idea.

Our mortgage company has been sending us letter and emails and an occasional phone call inviting us to do the refinance, and I finally decided it was a good idea that would save us a few hundred dollars each month.

So, I made the call, and let me tell you, if you’ve never done this before, it is no simple task. Just to get through the initial approval process, we had to provide: the last two years’W-2s for each of us, the last two months of pay stubs, two forms of identification, two items showing proof of residence, the most recent statements showing the balance of all of the debts we were rolling into our mortgage and our most recent bank statements — oh, and have an appraisal done. Well, that took a little while to get together but I did it. Then, the whole application went into the approval process, getting kicked upstairs until the final boss gave his thumbs up.

And then… it was time to schedule a closing date, which we eventually did. That was on Oct. 16 — or at least it was supposed to be. At the last minute… well actually after the last minute, when no one showed up for the closing… we were told theat we would have to reschedule the closing because they were waiting to hear back on a verification of my employment. Because I guess the W2s and pay stubs and such were not sufficient?

Does anyone have a pair of left-handad scisors I can borrow?