There are so many lessons to be learned in this Notary world and the sooner you learn some of them, the better, the more sanity you retain and the better off you’ll be in the end. Some of those lessons are easy, some are harder and some will cost you time, energy, money and maybe a little of your sanity.
Early on in my Notary career, I figured out that Title Companies and Lenders each do things in their own way. A bit like us Notaries – yes, we do this too. They will do things that don’t make sense to us and they don’t have to make sense to us – for example:
Having 6 copies of the CD or any document in your package.
Including 20 pages relating to Proof of Insurance in the Signing package, none of which require a signature.
Requiring Notarization of a document, but barely giving you space for your Signature let alone your stamp.
Requiring both an Acknowledgment and a Jurat (Oath) for the same document on the same page, one right after the other.
I simply came to the conclusion that these things and all of the others that I didn’t list make sense to someone, somewhere. And, that’s OK. Once again, they don’t have to make sense to us. And really for the most part beyond being a little annoying and causing us a little time, paper and toner, it’s not really a big deal.
Sometimes it affects us:
I had only been doing Notary work for about a year when I completed a Signing, went home and scanned and uploaded documents. It did not require a final review and OK and I dropped the package. And then the next day, came the phone call. Title was saying that a Date needed to be fixed. Turns out that 1 date in an 80 page package was missing a leading zero. Instead of XX/XX/XXXX for the date, it had X/XX/XXXX. Title Fed Ex’d the whole package back to me. I then drove 12 miles, 1 way, to get the Signer to add a zero to the Date. I then drove home, scanned that one page and then paid (at my expense) to Fed Ex the package back to Title.
It was a humbling experience, but the lesson was learned. Since then, I require every date to be in the XX/XX/XXXX format – no exceptions. I have really become a little obsessive about it. I know there are some Title Companies and some Lenders (many even) who don’t care about that kinda of detail, but there is at least 1 and I refuse to ever have to pay for something like that again.
Lesson learned.
Leave a Reply