The Next Phase

First up, let me apologize if you are having trouble reading this.  Blog-city made me change versions at the end of the year and this version is much less user friendly than the last.  I still can't figure out how to change the color of the blog entries titles!  I was thinking of changing to an all-white scheme, but then my little buttons on the right disappear.

Where did we leave off?  Well, there were some comments to my last posting. 
Current debt to income ratio was mentioned by a couple of posters.  Howdy used to make a base of $125,000/yr.  That's how we got into this house.  He had a company furnished car, so we leased my car at $629/mo, our only payment at the time.  When he had to turn his car in, we bought him a used Honda for $346/mo.  That's where the car payments come in.  It sucks, but we weren't really irresponsible about the aquisitions considering the situations at the time.

Home rental is a viable option, except most of the homes in my area that are available are more than I'd be paying if I bought the house, since I have to put 20% down.  I can actually save more money if I buy the house rather than rent it.

Another poster inquired about counter-offering for a home you're selling.  Sure, you can!  You can counter back and forth until you are both satisfied, or someone walks away.

Have you ever had a garage sale where you feel like you've priced everything very fairly and still you have someone come in and try to dicker with you over every single item they are interested in?  That is how I feel our sales negotiations on this home have been.  I am certain that their agent has made them aware that we paid $450,000 for this house and to have them counter offer repeatedly is really demeaning.  The icing on the cake however, was finding the home they currently live in listed at Zillow for $685,000!!  I spoke some bad words about that.  Our last counter was $410,000 and I told the realtor that was as low as we could go and still have a down payment on another place.  They countered twice more after that.  I'm afraid I was less than pleasant with our realtor the last time she called.  She must have forwarded the message, because they finally agreed to our price.

So, we have a signed contract now and they have a few more days to inspect and option out if they like.  We have gone home hunting twice now and find the offerings dismal at best.  There are two possible candidates.  One is larger than we'd like, and it has a pool.  It's at the top of our affordability scale.  It is in a great location and it has a place to park our pop-up camper.  The second house is way at the back of a different subdivision.  It's only one year old.  The backyard is a only a rectangle of grass (very desirable!!).  However, this house is less than half the size of our current one, which will require huge amounts of scaling back.  Price is right and we might be able to even better that.  No place for camper, so at the worst, we'd have to rent storage for it.  Neither option is ideal, and the three of us has vacillated endlessly over the weekend about them.  If all goes according to plan, we have to be out by the 8th of Feb, so we don't really have a lot of time to mull this decision over, either.  I think we're going to wait a couple more days to see if anything new comes up and then bite the bullet and make an offer.

In the karma department, my bestest buddy called me a couple of nights ago and informed me that Howdy's former employer has closed three of his restaurants recently.  It's childish, but I can't help but grin over it.

Feel free to opine at will over this...