I seem to be achieving one of my goals for this house buying process – do as much as possible electronically – at least more than the last time I went through this dance.
I hate FAX machines. I hate the “me use markum stick on dead tree to make decision real!” culture. I can move my life savings with the click of a button – but I have to pass information through paper to (for example) apply for a mortgage.
Anyway, two technologies helped a lot:
* onebox manages my business phone number. They provide a virtual switchboard from which I can control what *real* phone number rings when you dial that business number. I can point my number to my colleagues when I’m on vacation – and perhaps most beautiful – if you send a FAX to that business number, it shows up as a PDF in my email.
* faxzero accepts PDFs and faxes them for me. Under three pages of material is free, but they put an ad on the cover sheet.
Between these two I’m nearly paperless – at the very least I avoid the idiot dance of finding my fax machine, plugging it in, finding a land line phone to connect to it, etc. The remaining problem is that I still need to print, sign, and scan stuff. I could fix that with photoshop and a scanned version of my signature – but that strikes me as a security risk.
