In Britain it can take only days to get a mortgage approved; in Barbados it took, let me see, two years and counting. Back in 2003 we looked around for a suitable mortgage lender and eventually settled on one of the many banks of Canadian origin in Barbados.
By December of that year, we’d sent the forms off, but we had our first setback when the person we’d been dealing with got promoted and our case was handed over to someone who just didn’t do email – a major problem when you’re doing things at a distance. Finally we went into the bank to sign the paperwork, but still nothing happened. We then emailed our original contact who was able to get things moving.
It took till March 2004 to open our account and as it turned out the paperwork still wasn’t done, with questions continuing to come about land tax (paid), water supply to the land (none, how could there be) and the power of attorney my mother had. I could feel another trip to the notary coming on. Finally, in April 2005, we got the final bit of paperwork notarised – or so we thought.
But another problem surfaced. It turned out that the original land transfer form had been incorrectly filled out and had to be changed by the Central Bank (they keep an eye on all money in and out of the country) and you have to register your funds if you want to be able to take them out again). Apparently, what we owned was the thin air above the land, not the land itself.
Everyone admitted that this was just a clerical error (though why it had taken three years to pick it up I don’t know) and the build was allowed to proceed, though we had a delay of a week while waiting for everything to be processed. But after a period of four years to get from sight of land to start of build, one week’s delay seemed a small price to pay for finally beginning our dream.
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