2002-07-31 - 1:12 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "You've Got A Friend", Carole King

Groooooooooan.

Well, we knew we were getting into this. There are approximately $8000 worth of repairs that the house needs, all pretty much right away. If you recall, part of the need for this repairs is the dreadful excuse for "repairs" that the owner did/had done in the past. (There is an additional few thousand for something we are planning on getting rid of, as well.)

We've been offered a $2500 credit at closing.

Not only that, but $1500 of that is from the seller's AGENT. The seller would only pay $1000. That's pretty bad. Seems to indicate that the seller is ready to walk away from this deal rather than cough up any more money. The agent apparently feels a little responsible for talking up the owner too much about the hot market and raising his expectations. You'd think the owner would understand that if his house hasn't sold in 7 months, the price is too high for the current market, but that's why he's a geezer.

Our options, then, are: Suck it up, or back out of the deal.

Part of me (and definitely part of Poindexter) would like nothing more than to back out of the deal and let the house sit on the market for another year.

So, we had another go-round last night about whether it was really worth it to buy this house. It's looking to us like the real estate market is slowing down here, and we are definitely paying too much for this house, in the sense that we're paying more than its current market value. We discussed the idea of renting again, and of buying one of the other houses we'd seen which was smaller, not as good a layout, and had a less desirable location but was cheaper. Or of staying here in the studio until we find another perfect house.

Now, I had hoped only for $4000 from the seller. It's not worth the $1500 difference to me to back out of the deal, so there's that. We are also pretty sure that with a little sweat equity, we can get our money's worth out of this. And even under our most conservative scenarios, we're still better off buying than renting, even if we only stay here for three years. In fact, we plan to stay here for a very long time -- this house and location are what I've been waiting for, and I have no reason to move unless we want to go to Florida. Plus, there are indications from other houses on the market that once we fix this house up -- a lot of which we can do ourselves -- we'll get a decent return on our investment.

Poindexter also made one other interesting point: Our overpayment is balanced by the fact that we don't do anything else expensive in our life. We don't buy fancy-ass cars, we don't go on fancy-ass vacations, we never buy alcohol, and we don't buy diamonds. It all works out in the end, I think.

Given all this, and the fact that this house has nearly EVERYTHING we wanted, it looks like our choice is to suck it up.

Well, at least I feel more like we might really live in this house. Up until now, I've felt like it was still up in the air. At this point, the only thing that would keep it from happening is if something's disclosed that we didn't know about.

We also had another go-round about finances. It's a little scary buying a house at the top end of your price range when you also own another one. With the whole stock market thing and the real estate slowdown, we had to mentally go over what we would do under various scenarios, such as one of us getting laid off for an extended period, no renter for an extended period, having an "Oops" (an unexpected baby), stuff like that.

The answer to the most dramatic situations is "Sell the house in Virginia". And due to my conservative estimates of "our price range", we can handle no renter indefinitely -- it just means our savings would dwindle to a few hundred a month. The extended layoff scenario (which might be accompanied by an inability to sell the Virginia house) scares me a little. But in terms of current work available, both our jobs are secure for at least two years and are not directly affected by stock market activity. Plus, both our job skills are translateable to other related fields. And if worse came to worst, we have some money in our retirement accounts, too.

So, basically, we're a couple of nervous nellies but I think it's going to work out fine. As Poindexter said, "We have resources."

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