Hi Everyone! Phew, looking back I realized that I haven’t updated since JULY! So I will do my best to give a run down of everything that has happened since then. I kept thinking I was going to post once our money situation smoothed out, with my raise and everything happening it all looked wonky and weird, buuuut the money situation never really smoothed out, so here I am.
First, some background. Not to go into a ton of detail, but there are some really unsafe things going on in our neighborhood, not just a little unsafe, very very unsafe and with kids that’s no good. It has progressively gotten worse and we have felt compelled to move for a long time and have been very stuck.
We want to stay in our town, we love our town and the people and we love the school that our kids go to and my parents live in our town and moved here for us, so leaving the town is off the table. BUT there are also no rentals, and almost no houses up for sale ever. Currently there is a small handful (10 or less) and half of them are over 400k.
The other side to this is that even if we could somehow find “the perfect house” all of the houses less than 300k get sold in a matter of hours (I’m not kidding), so there’s no seller willing to put up with waiting while you sell your house first. So we could put our house up for sale (and try to sell it with 3 kids running around) and hope that there was another house that was less than 300k and available for us to purchase once we sold it, or literally wait months for a house to come on the market and have to live with my parents in their not big enough house.
The next choice was finding a house, buying said house, and living with 2 mortgages for a bit. Up until my raise in July this was not a possibility, our income (and student loan debt) didn’t allow us to have 2 mortgages at the same time, (I practically begged the bank lady but alas, no) so that was off the table as well.
For a long time I have felt very sad and desperate to provide our kids with a safer setting and there was nothing I could do about it. Until my raise in July gave us the income we would need to sustain 2 mortgages and December.. in December a foreclosed upon house went up for sale that fit all of the biggest criteria, less than 270k, close to my parents, still in our town, and big enough to fit us. It’s not perfect, BUT it’s SAFE! We put in an offer (along with 6 other bids within the first 48 hours) and our offer was accepted!
So financially, things will go back to being a bit tight. We can still pay all of our bills (including 2 mortgages), and we can still make tiny baby steps towards continuing to pay off debt, but things will be slowed down and we’ll take on a bit of new debt in order to sell the current house and get the new house move in ready. Once the current house is sold (at a steep discount), we should be able to pay off any new credit card debt and get back on track. I hate that we have to do this, it feels like a backward slide money-wise, but I keep trying to remind myself that it’s temporary. I love our current house, but safety of our kids is my number one priority and now that I have the opportunity to keep them safe, I’m going to do it.
So, all that being said, I may not update again for about a month- we’re working hard on getting the new house ready for us to move in, and the existing house ready for us to sell with a goal of having it on the market by the middle of March. I still can’t believe it’s happening!
How are you all doing out there?!
