Housing

As most of you know we are planning on moving to southern Maryland sometime this fall.  This has been a long process.  Victor was first offered the job (verbally) in March.  We spent a few days meeting the people he would be working with and exploring the area.  We decided we would be okay moving there and by the end of April had communicated that to his future department.

In May we started actively looking at houses in southern Maryland.  After touring about 15 homes and not finding anything we really liked we decided that we would build a house again.

Building a house is (or I should say--was) not much more expensive and then we can pick out what we want so it seemed to be the way to go.  We picked a neighborhood and a builder and finalized the building plans by the end of May. 

We needed to sell our house in WI so we got that ready and listed it around June 1st.  (Thank you Dad and Colin for all your help.)

During June and July nothing happened -- not in the building process, selling process, or final job offer process.  Very frustrating.

Two weeks ago Victor was given an official offer.  We are still in the process of negotiating salary but it is almost complete. 

Our tenants moved out of our house in WI on August first so we are now able to be more aggressive during the sale process (they were not real compliant with showings) and have dropped our price by $10,000.  We will likely be dropping it another $5,000 soon.  We have had more interest and our real estate agent thinks we are close to finding a buyer.  Hopefully.  Even if we don't drop the price any further we are going to lose $50,000 at a minimum -- likely closer to $75,000.  Very painful. Terrible really-- hopefully it will be a once in a lifetime experience.  

In Maryland-- the job offer is moving closer to being finalized and we anticipate Victor starting his job there somewhere around October 1st.   The house building is still going nowhere.  They are still waiting for the building permit.  What?!  How does that take 3 months?  So at this point the earliest they will dig a hole in the ground is September 1st (likely later) which means the house wouldn't be done until January 1st at the earliest.  Not so great.  3 months of commuting  1 1/2-2 hours each way will not work. 

In addition to the house building process being completely stalled the house prices have continued to drop. This is good except it means the price we locked in at is too high!  If we have to sell the house again in 3-5 years we will likely be in a situation where we are going to lose money again.  It would be difficult to absorb this twice.

So what do we do?  Well, I have been looking for other housing options.  There is not a ton of homes available in the area.  I did find one that looks promising though.  It is in the same neighborhood we are going to build in.  It is only 2 years old, has a finished basement, and is $55,000 less than what we were going to spend.  It is a short sale which could slow down the process but it seems like a super good deal.  The sellers have dropped the price of their house by $45,000 since January (and still haven't sold it).  We are going to look at it on Wednesday.  The interior is not beautiful and I do not like the kitchen lay out at all but I can overlook things like that for $55,000 I think!

This is all causing me a bit of anxiety and I have a few specific prayer requests....


1--  We sell our house in Waukesha quickly!  Preferably in the next 2-3 weeks.  In addition to dropping the price we have also offered the agent that sells it an extra $1000 if we get an offer before the end of the month.

2--  We will have clear direction regarding whether or not to put an offer in on the cheaper house.  We would likely need to put an offer in without a contingency regardless of whether or not we sell our house.  We need a place to live regardless of whether of not we sell our house but it will be much easier to come up with a 20% down payment after selling our house!  We are going to look at this house on Wednesday!

3-- That the builder will let us out of our contract without fighting us.  We have only given them $1000 and we know we would lose that (we are okay with that) but we hope they don't try to fight us harder.  I informed the builder of our thought process this morning and have not heard anything back from them.

4-- That we make the the right decisions and have peace about it!


Thanks for letting me pass some of my stress onto you -- hopefully I will sleep better tonight.