The Mortgage Meeting Where Everyone Got Frustrated
At first, I thought all I had to do was translate. My dad didn’t fully understand English, so I assumed I could just help explain a few things during the mortgage meeting. But that Zoom call became something completely different. The lender started talking fast. “DTI.” “Escrow.” “Closing costs.” “Interest rate buy-down.” The words kept coming like a language that sounded familiar but still felt impossible to hold onto. I tried translating everything into Korean. But somewhere in the middle of the meeting, I realized something uncomfortable: I didn’t fully understand it either. Even before the meeting started, the atmosphere already felt tense. “You need to explain this to us.” “Listen carefully.” “If you don’t understand, ask questions.” Everyone sounded calm on the surface, but underneath it all, everyone was nervous. My parents had experience with housing in Korea and Kyrgyzstan. But the American mortgage system felt like an entirely different universe. In Korea, people grow up...