I am in the process of refinancing my mortgage. It’s a nasty process. A truly nasty, unsavory sort of thing that I liken to emptying the baby’s diaper Dekór bin every week.

To be fair, I have found a broker that has been, up to this point, extremely easy to work with, but as these things go, the closer we get to closing, the more intractable he’s becoming in our dealings. For instance, he claims the bank is requesting the following:

• Explanation why I’ve changed jobs twice in the last year. Is that really any of their business? They’ve seen my W2 so they can tell that I’ve not been dropping work and laying around on my keester.
• They claim this one is for the government, but they’re asking how many children we have and what their ages are. I suspect this is “big brother” trying to do as much IRS cross-referencing as they can by being sneaky about it.
• They want to see my full bank statement and not just the one that shows the balances. Why? It’s none of your business WHERE I spend my money; only that I’ve got enough to cover the closing costs! I go through a LOT to cover my tracks on the Internet where I do the majority of my shopping, so I’ll be durned (yes, that’s a Southern word) if I’m gonna just hand it all over to some nameless nobody over at Fifth Third bank.

Maybe I’m paranoid because I live and breathe Internet security and the protection of personal information, but half of this mortgage paperwork process seems less like making sure I’m a good risk and more like trying to gather data on middle-income America.

And last I checked, wasn’t there some kind of issue with the housing market? I’m not against banks per se, but in this economy, if they’re being THAT picky about who they loan money to, that tells me they’re sitting on a WAD of cash and don’t feel like they necessarily need to loan it out. Wonder how much of that wad came out of my taxes?