Up, Up, Up, and … stay put where you are for a while.
Well, we’ve gone and done it now!
http://homes.longandfoster.
Our house is on the market, for better or for worse. No pictures up yet – our realtor says by next week.
I’m nervous about the money. I do feel like we should try to move now, because if it works then we can lock in APRs as low as 4.8% and take advantage of lower home values. But on the other hand, our projected mortgage is exactly half our income, and that terrifies me. It’s not like we have a huge amount of diposable income lying around right now as it is. And if our bills get even bigger (I’m looking at YOU, non-insulated 1906 farmhouse), will we still be able to afford to eat?
I’m going through my Quicken accounts now trying to make sense of all the graphs and readouts that it’s giving me. I want to try and live on that supposed future mortgage right now, by putting all the “extra” mortgage money into savings and seeing if we can actually do this thing. But you know, it’s not like we live decadently now. I really don’t know where that kind of money will come from. Perhaps we should have figured that out before putting our house on the market, no matter what our bank tells us… ya think?
On the other hand, nothing is happening any time soon. Chance are that our house won’t sell at all – there are so many bad loans (50%) in our county that real estate around here is extremely devalued. And while we’re pricing our house low (as low as we can, to be able to still afford a reasonable down payment on a bigger house), it’s still higher than many of the bargain-basement prices around us (though most of those are short sales or foreclosures and will take months to get through the bank – and only 5% of them do – so savvy buyers shouldn’t be looking at them).
I guess we’re in a good position to be in. We’re not desperate to move, we’ve got a couple years before Taco will really need to be able to run outside, and thus we can afford to set a reasonable price. I’m not worried about it not selling. I’m happy enough to stay where I am for a while, and the longer it takes means the more we get saved.
On the other hand, I have my heart set on an old farmhouse we saw recently and would be sad to see it get snatched up before we can get to it.