<prompt> Human: My girlfriend and I live in FL now but we may have an opportunity to buy her childhood home in NY on short sale. Her father says we could offer 150,000 since the only other guy is offering 148,000 now but I dont know if we could make it work. She wants to do it sooner than later so we dont miss it but right now I pay all the bills and she doesnt bring much money in. Were renting a condo now and I feel like we can barely make ends meet. She may be changing careers and hopefully Ill be a little further along in mine to be pulling in more money, but it doesnt seem likely.Aside from that, which already makes me think it cant happen, I have some questions. Is it a conflict of interest for her father to sell to us on short sale? All the mortgage calculators Ive used say well be paying pretty much double the cost of the house with interest over the life of the loan. Is that typically the case in mortgages? Or is that just with minimum payments?  <response>: Its no longer an arms length transaction and signing an affidavit from the bank stating so will be fraud. Short sale sellers cant usually sell to a family member, or someone in close relation to them. The bank sees this as potentially shady, hence the need for an arms length transaction affidavit. 