What's in the package?

For those of you who've never purchased an apartment in a New York City co-op building, prepare yourself. And I don't meant that purely mentally.
Yes, it is a brain drain and can be emotionally exhausting, but you must also prepare your entire financial life to be studied, dissected, combed thru, and questioned.
This all takes the form of what is called "The Board Package".

Submitting the Board package.

You submit this document after you have a selling agreement with the buyer.
It includes every single fact about your financial life that you can think of...your salary, investments, savings, physical assets, past tax returns, credit history, W2's, 401K, and so on. But that's not all. It's customary to require several letters of reference (on personal stationary please), but also letters from your employer, your bank, and your investment company. In short, your life is laid bare and nothing can be hidden.
Why?
Because the Board wants to make extremely sure that you can afford to buy into the 'company'. See, you're not buying real estate, you're buying shares of stock in a corporation that owns real estate. They don't want to make a bad investment in the company. It's a hard notion to wrap your head around, but I've done it three times now. You resign yourself that it is what it is. You can't fight it. You buck up and pull together all the information they need and if you have a good realtor like I did, they do the brunt of the work in packaging it. Sometimes you need as many as ten copies of this tome.
They get delivered to the Board and then you wait.
And wait.
Sometimes it's a simple 'yes'.
But for me, not this time.
I had a pesky situation with something in my past that the Board was questioning, something I never knew anything about. And it had the potential of derailing my chances of buying the apartment altogether.
I was out on the ledge and ready to jump...