Step 24: Wire Transfer Your Down Payment

You’ve finally made it to the end – only two more steps to go. Now comes the painful one; parting with your hard-earned dollars. It’s time to pay the down payment and the closing costs.

The morning before closing, your mortgage lender will email you an estimate of your down payment and closing costs (remember closing costs are usually 2 – 3% of the purchase price of the property). Generally, you won’t get this figure until the morning before closing and it HAS to be transferred that same day (ie. the day before closing). Your title company will also email you the wire transfer instructions which gives you the account number to send the wire transfer. Make sure you find out what time your bank stops accepting same-day wire transfers as it’s not the same as their regular business hours. Therefore, they may be open until 8 pm, but the cut-off for same-day wire transfers is 3 pm. In that scenario, you’re going to need to finish the wire transfer prior to 3 pm. We can’t state loudly enough how important it is that the wire transfer be done the day before. 

Once you’ve sent over the wire transfer, email our team, your mortgage lender, and title closer so we can check to make sure the Title company received the funds. IMPORTANT: do NOT follow wire transfer instructions unless they were sent to you by the escrow closer from the Title company. We cannot stress enough that all wire transfers and financial instructions will come via password-protected or encrypted email from the escrow closer and not from me or your lender. There are a lot of scammers out there sending buyers fraudulent wire transfer instructions to divert your $ into their accounts. Before you transfer your funds, call the escrow closer directly to confirm the wire transfer instructions. DO NOT rely on the phone number in the email as this number could be fraudulent as well if the email is fraudulent. Look up the phone number for the escrow closer through Google or ask us. We cannot stress enough how careful you need to be when sending over your wire transfer to make sure it isn’t being directed to a fraudulent account.