Comment by stouset
3 days ago
> I have money from my grandad, received 40 years ago. No one really has records going back that far but you try buying a house and they want proof of the origin of the funds.
This makes zero sense.
I have bought a house, and they want bank records going back like a few months or maybe a year at most. If that money has been sitting in an account for that long, nobody gives a shit where it originally came from. Like, if you had $100,000 for a down payment, they’re not checking the last twenty years of your paystubs to make sure the math checks out.
The only thing they really are interested in is knowing this money didn’t just appear out of nowhere because you got a personal loan from someone or because you got a conventional loan from a lender that hasn’t reported it to a credit reporting agency yet, and which would affect the decision to underwrite your loan.
If you’ve just been holding on to large sums of literal cash dollar bills for the last 40 years, that is such a comically ridiculous financial decision I don’t even know what to tell you.
> I have bought a house, and they want bank records going back like a few months or maybe a year at most.
I had to juggle with this a little bit because I had sold some crypto for the down payment, but it's crypto that I had been keeping in a hardware wallet for years. As a result, I could certainly generate records showing how long I'd had it, but they'd be my own records based on the blockchain--not from any bank.
They ended up accepting transaction records from Coinbase, though even those mostly just showed some Bitcoin being received into the account and then being sold before transferred to the bank. But I guess that was enough for them.
In any case: I did ask about it and they told me it wasn't actually for KYC laws or money laundering. The reason they want a paper trail is to make sure you didn't actually just borrow the money from someone else. And that makes sense, since they're super picky about you not opening any new lines of credit while trying to close the mortgage.