If you have noticed a decrease in posts here at Coupon Are Great there is a great reason for that. You see, we are moving! The move is seven miles away. Moving anywhere is a giant pain in the batooshie though!
Despite our plans to save money to have a 20% down payment on a new house, we strayed from the goal.
We sat down at our meeting yesterday and asked ourselves “What is our BIG goal”? The answer to that was “To save money for a house with a basement” (we do live in an area where there are tornadoes and they get scarier and scarier year after year).
We tested the waters and called our realtor just to see how the real estate market was going in our area. We signed up for emails of houses that fit our narrow criteria. Since we are moving because we want to (rather than HAVE to) we were very specific on what we wanted. Our list included a house with basement, a back yard, and a side street or cul-de-sac in a narrow price range. I looked at many houses online and several in person. We made an offer on a house about a mile away from our current house. It was verbally accepted……but then we lost it because we refused to buy a house that wouldn’t accept an appraisal. We didn’t want to make up the cash difference and be upside down on our mortgage immediately. That didn’t make financial sense and seemed plain shady. So we waited some more.
Another house came on the market and our offer was accepted about a week before we went on vacation to Isle of Palms, South Carolina. My perfected planned plans were tossed aside and instead of having a house sitter stay at the house with the dog and cat we had to board the pets instead so our house could be shown by realtors while we were on vacation. It made sense to let realtors have open access to our house while we were away.
Boy did that turn out to be a great decision. From Tuesday to Saturday our house had 26 showings and several offers. I can’t imagine having been in our house and needing to leave with 2 little girls, a cat, and a dog, twenty six different times. I would have gone crazy (as would all the afore mentioned).
We close on our new house this week and will move in next week. We close on our current house at the end of next week. My fingers are crossed that everything works as planned and that both closings go off without a hitch.
Rooms have been repainted, repairs have been performed, boxes have been packed. We are almost ready to say good bye to this house and this chapter of our lives. Almost!