The Winds of Change?
Like I mentioned before, we assumed we’d buy a house when we moved here. We made an offer on a short sale (sale price is less than is owed on the property, so has to be approved by the lenders who will have to eat the difference) – a very nice house in a great neighborhood near the schools our kids would attend. It had an extra bedroom for guests, an office, and a huge bonus area for a pingpong table. 2,700 square feet of new construction. We waited seven months to find out that, even though both banks involved had okay’d our offer, Fannie Mae wanted more… $46k more. In retrospect, we’re so glad that it was such a big amount of additional cash they wanted — that it was so easy to walk away from. We made offers on two other homes during the following year, but one was another short sale with bizarre prerequisites (like money in escrow before the offer was even accepted). The other offer was beat out by cash.
The fourth offer stuck and we got as far as the inspection, which was okay. And, how can I say this without sounding like a crazy person?… Every day between when we made the offer and eventually pulled it, we were hit by bizarre, unexpected expenses. Wack!.. $2,000 to fix the car. Slam!.. $2,000 medical. Kablam!.. $1,000 dental. Those were just the big ones… lots of little ones scattered in like shrapnel. Though we still could have made the down payment, we would have had nothing left for emergencies, nothing for furniture, nothing in savings. Isn’t that the American Way?
We did pull the offer. The worst part was calling our realtor. The second worst part was telling everyone who was excited for our new home-ownership adventure that we were disembarking. We had expected to be home-owners again, and the disorientation of directional change struck hard. Now what?
- A family experiment to see if we can free ourselves from the clutter of modern life and the ideas we come across while trying it.
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