Educating the Wheelers

When the house you bought that cost 20% less than the Other House allows you to get a 15 year mortgage instead of a 30 year mortgage, but the monthly PITI [Principal, Interest, Tax, Insurance] payment is the same.

Thanks to everyone who has peeked in on us lately or dropped us a line to make sure we’re still breathing. We are!

Life has been amazingly hectic lately, and I haven’t been able to keep up with email, let alone blog. As it is, I am typing this one-handed while I rock a fussy Owen…

We did end up buying a house, after a lot of hustle, fuss and grief. We found one we liked that dropped their asking price by 50k before we made an offer, which made life easier, since we didn’t have to try to come in and explain why their house was 50k overpriced. [Which is what killed our previous deals. I should note that neither of those houses have yet sold ... ] We only had to get them to come down just a little bit farther.

But, we’re happy, we like the house. Moving in and settling has been very slow going. We closed mid-November, had to do some flooring work, didn’t move in until the day after Christmas. To this day, we still have boxes and furniture in the garage, only one bedroom set up.

I’ve only cooked a couple of meals in the kitchen, so you know we’ve been burning through money while we settle. Last night, I managed to make Whole Wheat pasta [on sale for a buck a box] with Cream Cheese Basil Sauce from Hillbilly Housewife and a 3-bean salad from my new favorite cookbook, Hopkins’ Healthy Home Cooking .

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.

It’s been a pretty crazy couple of months here at EtW. Not that you’d know, of course, because the blog has been largely silent. But the kids keep getting bigger. And cuter:

Audrey is really starting to read more and more, and is starting to sound out words that she doesn’t have memorized by just hearing the same book 100 times. Owen is flipping himself over and starting to army crawl. And babbling up a storm! When it was just Audrey and I at home alone, I hadn’t really figured out the whole how to talk to something that doesn’t talk back thing, so she grew up in a very quiet world. Our doc had us bring her in some time after her first birthday to check her hearing since she wasn’t making any moves towards talking. Owen’s world is much louder, crazier, more boisterous … and he definitely wants in on the conversation.

Finance-wise, everything is in … well, let’s not call it turmoil due to negative connotations, though it is the first term that came to mind. Let’s call it “in flux.” Andrew loves his new job, and we’re still in the process of figuring out our new insurances, new savings plans, the whole shebang. We’re sitting on a junkload of cash, but that’s only because we’re still squatting at my parents’ house.

Actually, living at my parents’ house is not the nightmare that it could very well be. The weirdest thing for me is not being in my own space. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom now for almost three years, and it’s weird being in another mom’s [my own mom's!] domain all day. Not my kitchen, not my pantry. Not my fridge! I’m doing a fair amount of the cooking, but my parents’ have, let’s say, a different palette than we do. But we’re finding common ground.

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 was beginning to wonder why I’ve never gotten anything from Amazon Associates. I mean, I’m not exactly their highest traffic associate, but I did actually fairly recently get enough referrals for them to send me a gift certificate.

[Note: they won't send out a GC until you have at least 10 dollars of referral fees, so you know we're not talking big bucks here. But, hey! 10 dollars is 10 dollars I didn't have before! Two books for the kids! Or maybe apply it towards House Season 1 dvd set for me ... ]

So I go wade through the site to find out that they sent me one a few weeks ago … aha. Gmail spam filter, you lil’ devil! Sure enough, there it was sitting in my spam bucket. Thankfully I found it before 30 days was up and it shuffled off this mortal coil into the ether.

Anywhoo, moral of the story: Gmail marks the Amazon associates gift certificates as spam! Keep your eyes peeled.

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.]

I was looking forward to blogging about the process of selling our house, but very quickly realized that the chances were pretty good that our buyers might do the very same thing I did when I found out their names: Google them and try to find out their story.

So, uh, yeah. That wouldn’t exactly be the best bargaining position.

Suffice to say, the option period is over, the negotiating is over, so I can share that we put our house on the market on a late Friday night, and selected an offer over asking price made the next day. If everything goes according to plan, we should close at the end of this month.

I would also like to add that it’s really, really awesome to be moving from an area with a relatively hot real estate market [Austin] to a market that’s currently in the tank [Twin Cities]. Searchlight Crusade has a nice recent article about buyer’s markets that I found very timely for us. Mainly, how do you deal with the notion that you should wait to buy, because aren’t prices just going to drop lower?

There was a post recently on Blog Maverick about the current state of movie marketing, and how much it costs and what folks do to get a rear end in a seat on opening weekend of a movie. He then tosses the ball out and wants to know who’s got a better idea.

I am just an average Joe, and I always look at these types of questions as to what sorts of marketing sways me. I posted that they should take the “28 Days Later” approach further — that movie had posted the first X minutes online for anyone to see. But, in that case, you would have had to come to it, either by word of mouth or stumbling across it or seeing an ad telling you to go see it or whatnot. Instead, why not take the AOL approach and mail the first X minutes [to a suitable cliffhanger or whathave you] and send it out on dvd to everyone’s mailbox?

That way you could reach people like, say, my aunt, who goes to movies, but would never, ever go to Apple’s Trailers page.

It can’t be that expensive, or I wouldn’t have gotten so many AOL discs in my life.

Of course, to actually get me back into a movie, you’d have to have a cry room. Or a Tuesday matinee “baby day” like our local Alamo Drafthouse theaters. And a take-no-prisoners no cell phone policy. Hey, like our local Alamo Drafthouse theater!