Educating the Wheelers

I was going to go to Walmart or Target today, but I think I’m going to push that off. Those two were my biggest budget-busters last month. (Well, second biggest. The 550 dollar dental bill was the killing blow, really.) Sometimes it feels impossible to leave one of those stores with less than 100 dollars (or worse) worth of stuff, even if the only items on my list were “Generic Infant Tylenol” and “diapers.”

Willpower is not my specialty, to paraphrase Wallace.

That’s my current strategy with the grocery store, as well. Hold it off as long as humanly possible. It does help that it’s winter and most of the fruit is pretty hardy and will last a long time. It’s also giving me an excuse to rotate my freezer stock. Audrey is a particular fan of frozen long green beans — she always asks for “Bamboo Salad” (her name for it!):

1 bag frozen Aldi’s green beans or equivalent
A small little bit of balsamic dressing, store bought or homemade
4oz or less crumbled feta
a handful of walnuts

Empty bag of green beans in a colander and run under cool water for a little while to defrost a little. They’re very skinny, so it won’t take long. Put in a bowl with other ingredients. Serve to delighted child.

Heck, she doesn’t even eat the feta and walnuts — that’s just in for mom. I got some of those “spray” bottles of dressing really cheap a while ago, so I just use about 6-7 sprays of that and it seems to be plenty. With that and a restrained amount of cheese and walnuts, the salad manages to be decently healthy.

Getting your oil changed with two kids under the age of three can be pretty stressful. Lately, I have been going the Wal-Mart route where you drop your car off in the back, and they change your oil while you walk around and shop. This is an excellent option, you would think, because it’s easier to blow time with two small kids in Wal-mart than in an oily waiting room at a Jiffy Lube and similar alternatives.

Now, at Jiffy Lube and friends, you generally only have to wait about 20 minutes or so. And every time I’ve been to Wal-Mart for an oil change, it’s been 1h45m to 2 hours.

Okay.

Here’s the thing. You know that Wal-Mart finetunes their business model for maximum dollar, and I just can’t believe that making people wait for two hours is the optimum amount of time. I would guess 45-60 minutes would be ideal. Long enough that you can get hit the whole store and get all your shopping done, but, say, not so long that you end up becoming a downright destructive customer, letting your kids play with all the toys, read all the books on the shelf and just finding any way at all to blow the time.

The saddest part is that even at 2 hours, it’s still easier than 20 or 30 minutes in a Jiffy Lube waiting room.

While I would certainly not like to be a home-seller in the current Twin Cities’ home market [the last stat I heard was 8 sellers for every buyer], being a buyer isn’t currently a whole lot of fun, either.

I was kind of hoping we’d be in a house by now, but here we are, still crashing at my parents’ house. Our house in Austin sold within 24 hours, for over our asking price, and the proceeds have been sitting in Emigrant, generating interest while waiting to be used for a down payment. [And all of our belonging sit in a PODS storage facility somewhere. Thankfully, the interest does outweigh the PODS monthly storage fee.]

I haven’t been posting because, well, my real name is attached to this. And wouldn’t you google the name of the potential buyer of your property for dirt for negotiating? [And if not, why wouldn’t you?]

But here’s where we currently stand:

We’ve had purchase agreements put in on two houses. One we really, really, really loved. But the sellers didn’t seem to get the memo that the market isn’t what it used to be. They would hardly budge on price — and it really was overpriced — and we very nearly agreed to pay a little too much for the house because it had the highly desirable quality of being less than 4 blocks from my parents’ house. But in the back and forth negotiation with these folks, we felt nickel and dimed the whole way, enough to sour us on the deal. So we walked away. [We actually walked away twice. The first time, they came back to us after a week with a bit of a concession, and we thought they were finally getting realistic … but we quickly were disabused of that notion. And we walked away for good after that.]

The other house … well, it was a great house, too. It was a bit more expensive than the first one, but it was also a better house. We certainly could afford it, but it’d mean we’d be putting less into savings than we’re used to. We’re used to being aggressive savers, and we like it that way. Our feet were starting to feel a little cool, and then when the results of the inspection came back [and particularly after hearing the seller’s response to the problems that came up], they became icy. We wish them luck with another buyer.

We also fired our agent. But that’s a whole other story, one that might be best not being told. Heh. But suffice to say, you really ought to consider refusing to sign an exclusive buyers agreement with your agent, especially if your agent is an unknown quantity. You may be very, very glad you did.

But the real crux of the matter is that most sellers aren’t coming down in price yet, but here we are as buyers, reading the Wall Street Journal, reading the daily paper, watching the news, cruising the interweb, and all signs point to prices further dropping. So. Do you get tired of putting in lowball offers on houses that frankly don’t feel like lowballs, they just feel like an offer that means you won’t spend the first five year underwater on your mortgage? Or do you try to sniff out a seller who “gets it” and has already dropped the price of their home 50k because they come to terms with the fact that that train has already left the station? Or do you get used to living at your parents’ house with your husband and two small kids? [Let’s not even mention the cat and two dogs.]

This story is still developing.

** One thing you find in Minnesota is there are enough lakes that you sure don’t have to be rich to have a “lake house.”

Our Texas house sold in about 24 hours for over our asking price. That’s the good news. [And it is, admittedly, a longer, weirder story than that. Always is, isn’t it? But that’s the major gist of it.]

So here we are in Minnesota, crashing at my parents’ place with our kids and our cat [our dogs are staying with my Aunt, since my folks don’t have a fenced yard].

Buying a house has been much more of a hassle than selling one. I thought that wasn’t supposed to be the case these days. Heh.

Just today we cut off negotiations with the first seller that we’ve been dealing with. They appeared to have not gotten the memo that the Twin Cities housing market is in the tank right now. Eight buyers for every seller, sales volume down by almost 20% over last year, and all that jazz.

So, until we have a place, our down payment sits in Emigrant Direct making 5.15%…

I just wiped out a months and months of “save a dollar here, save a dollar there”s.

We didn’t have a whole lot of notice between deciding to look for a job in MN, and Andrew actually accepting a job up there. Once we knew we were going to start looking up North, we started eating primarily out of the freezer and doing our best to clear it out.

But eventually we had to start packing up the kitchen, and now it’s time to unplug the garage freezer. In addition to the bazillion ounces of frozen stockpiled breastmilk that I ended up having to donate, there was what turned out to be 8 full bags of roasts, steaks, chicken breasts, bullets of ground turkey, turkey sausage, hamburger, frozen fruits and veggies, pounds of butter … yeah. Everything that I had bought on big time sale and now wasn’t going to be able to use up.

I ended up giving it to my neighbor, who has extra freezer space and who held and rocked our baby — and entertained Audrey — for almost 5 hours tonight so Andrew and I could be free to work on packing. She’s going to share it with our other, retired neighbor who we’re quite fond of.

At least it’s going to a good home!

[If you’re squeamish, avert your eyes right now! And, of course, since we homebirthed both of our kids, there were two wrapped up placentas in there, too. Yeah, yeah, I know there are things you are supposed to do with them — bury it, plant a tree over it, etc — I suspect that a large number of people end up doing precisely what we did: stick it in the freezer and then completely forget about it.]

We are essentially packing and moving in two stages this time. First we’re getting all of the clutter and anything we can spare out of the house before it goes on the market [and anything you can’t see, like stuff in drawers]. Then after it sells, we’ll pull out the furniture and the bare bones we left in to live on. Because of the two stage process, we decided to try the PODS approach.

So, right now there’s a POD in the driveway and we’re filling it up with junk. They are going to come take it away the day before we go on the market where it’ll sit in storage. Then once we sell, we’ll get another POD [and possibly bring back the first, if it’s not full. But I think it will be.] Then we will have them transfer those two PODS to MN, where they will sit for about another month while we stay with my parents and buy a house up there.

It seemed like a more straightforward way to go than dealing with loading trucks, bringing to a storage facility, moving stuff from a facility back to a truck, then heading to MN, then putting in a facility, then reloading a truck and bringing it to our new home.

We don’t have the final numbers yet — it’s going to depend on how many PODS/of what size we end up filling — but it didn’t seem to be outrageously more than going the moving truck route, particularly for our situation. Both are plenty expensive for my taste.

When we moved from CA to TX, we had a good experience with Movex, but they use independent contractors to do the actual move, so we may have just gotten the luck of the draw. [Our drivers were a young married couple who were totally cool, and very helpful.]

So far, our PODS experience has been good. But there’s still plenty of time for it to go all to heck.

Clutter is bad enough when you have to look at it, but it’s a killer when you have to pack it all up so you can get your house ready to list.

I think I’ve packed 80 boxes so far. Probably more.

I’ve been arranging sitters to come over and play with/hold the kids while I pack. Owen has decided that these few days would be an excellent time to have a growth spurt and need multiple hour+ long nursing sessions. And then another one. And then another one. But in between those, I’ve been a packing FIEND!

I offhandedly mentioned in an email on a different subject to the HOA mailing list that we were putting the house up for sale on Friday and within an hour I received several emails from people who wanted to know more for their friends and family. [There is a large contingent of folks who grew up in this neighborhood who try to move back in.] I sent back a quick barebones email to the list, even mentioning that we didn’t have the price quite hammered out yet because there have been lots of comps just this week, even, but hey, call my realtor! My realtor reported that she has received several calls already. And this is five days before we list.

We got lucky when we bought this house — this is a high-demand, unique neighborhood. If you want to live in this part of town, you aren’t going to find much else with one acre lots and large amounts of mature trees, plus turnover has always been very, very low. My realtor has looked to see what else is currently available and suspects we’ll get offers quickly.

That sure would be nice. Anybody who peeks around the financial nooks and crannies of the internet has probably noticed that now is generally not the best time to be a seller, house-wise. It seems, at the moment, that Austin is currently dodging that bullet. But I guess we’ll see for sure when we list.

On the upside, where we will be buying — Mpls/St. Paul — looks like it’s in the thick of foreclosure central, and inventory is about twice what it was this time last year. Hopefully this all will work out in our favor.

If you’re a praying type, please keep us in mind.

One of the hazards of real-name blogging is that there are something things that you just can’t blog about.

For us, it was Andrew’s job search that has consumed our time and psychic energy for a few months. But now it’s over and the die has been cast and we’re moving forward and we can finally talk about it. [Everything financial that I’ve thought about in the last few months has related to the move, so it sort of cramped my blogging style.]

The job is in Minnesota, near where my parents live. I get on a plane next Wednesday with the two kids, and the house goes on the market two days later. Andrew will likely follow about a month later.

Yes, I am in full on panic mode.

But isn’t Owen ridiculously cute?

Though I’m able to keep a detached bemusement about it all, I had forgotten how grim post-partum depression can be, particularly for a fairly isolated stay-at-home mom. It is not helped by the fact that our children are, bless ‘em, “high need.” Owen howls if he is not constantly held. I know there are different schools of thought on how to handle those types of kids, and I don’t have a dog in that ideological fight, but in our household, his disposition means that my hands are never free. [The PP depression is not helped at all by his fussiness. Both of my children have been soothed when other people hold them and fuss when I do. The books tell you that it’s common to think “the baby hates me!” when you have pp depression, but I tell ya, my babies hate me. Heh.***]

Thankfully, this is a problem that you can help — though not completely alleviate — by throwing money at it.

I’ve managed to scrounge up a neighborhood girl who can come by once or twice a week for 3 hours and for 5 dollars an hour, she’ll play with my 2 and a half year old while I tend to the newborn, or if by the grace of God he is sleeping, I can take a shower or do laundry or something, anything.

There are no other babysitters in our neighborhood that haven’t already turned me down for being too busy, so I also occasionally hire a post-partum doula 1-2x a week for 4 hour shifts on weeks that the babysitter can’t help, and she’ll handle one or both kids, or do housework for me. That’s 15 dollars an hour.

I usually end up having some sort of help twice a week. So it’s not cheap, that’s for sure. But I keep reminding myself that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And I just have to keep myself sane until we get there.

*** At least I can look to Audrey’s example to know that he’ll grow out of it. He’s already starting to, thank God.

Wedding presents just don’t make much sense to me anymore. It used to be that people married when they were coming out of high school and leaving their parents’ house for the first time. They had little money and needed to outfit their new homes, and getting some pots and pans or a toaster would have been a real blessing.

The vast majority of people I know have gotten/are getting married in their late twenties/early to mid-thirties these days. So we’ve got two people who have been living on their own in their own places for about 10 years and already have bought everything they need to live comfortably. In fact, since it’s generally the melding of two independent 10-year-old households, there’s an overabundance of stuff to start with and there are several large donations to Goodwill. Most of the bridal registries I’ve seen look like an opportunity to upgrade to shinier and spiffier stuff rather than to help them get started with the necessities of life.

On the flipside, you now have late teenage and early twenties folks out on their own having to buy all this stuff for themselves right about the time when they have the least amount of disposable income until they start having their kids.

I’m not saying the answer is for everyone to go back to marrying their high school sweetheart right after graduation. [Lord knows I’m glad I’m not married to anyone I dated in high school! Or college, for that matter.] And I’m not just trying to wiggle out of buying wedding gifts because I’m cheap. [No, really!] But it seems like the tradition doesn’t much match the reality anymore.