Finding a place to stop for a while

I’m writing today from my home office. I haven’t been able to say that since…2001? In any case, it’s been a while and it’s nice not to be dragging Nicole to work with me and making her put up with whatever stress I’m feeling. My blind kitty has adjusted marvelously and he’s sleeping in his bed next to my desk. This isn’t bad.

So, let me briefly go over how we got here. This summer, during the lockdown, our cashflow was actually pretty good since we weren’t (and still aren’t) going anywhere near restaurants. We figured that we needed a bigger place than the one bedroom apartment we were in if I was going to be working from home for the foreseeable future. We started looking at two bedroom apartments and the lighbulb lit up. “We can’t afford to live here, but what if we bought a house close to here, close enough that I could come into town a few times a week?

Was our credit good enough? Could we afford it? Were there any places nearby where we would be happy living? At the time we started looking, the answers were “no,” “no,” and “who knows?” But, with decent cashflow, we were making inroads on the credit. We started looking at some of the towns around here and found some that would work (and many more that wouldn’t-anything requiring that I get on the interstate wasn’t going to work).

Then we found a place we really liked and everything to a lot more real. We decided to cash in our savings, get our credit card usage under control, and make sure we had enough on hand for putting a chunk down and then moving. It takes a while for the credit reporting places to show the changes and, in that time, we missed out on the place we’d found (we dubbed it “The Parsonage” because it was between a church and a library and had no neighbors at all…sigh).

Back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, a lot of other people were having the same thoughts we were and prices were going up at a crazy rate. We found some great places in bad locations, so lousy places in good locations, and some great places in great location that were just out of our range. It was getting frustrating as it felt like the window was closing.

But then (and I can’t believe I’m starting a paragraph with “but then…”), Nicole found a house that had been listed an hour earlier. She set up a showing for the next day and then told me “I found it.” Sure enough, she had: A house in a town we liked that had a style we loved and at a price we could swing. We met the realtor at the house and within about 5 minutes we were ready to make an offer. It was a good thing we didn’t wait as there were several offers on the first day, but ours was accepted, so…huzzah!

The next bit is crazy. We were pre-approved for the amount, but we now had to get down to locking in an interest rate and…holy smokes, interest rates are nothing right now. I do not have what anyone would mistake for good credit and we still came in south of 3 percent. We started giggling because that was beyond our wildest hopes (with the caveat that we have few wild hopes regarding percentages).

And here we are, a month later, and we’re in the place and it feels pretty great. We got incredibly lucky in that a lot of dominoes fell precisely where we needed them to to make this work. The long and the short of it is that we’ll be paying substantially less on our mortgage than we were paying in rent on our one bedroom apartment.

We got really lucky.

After a crazy, awful, frustrating, scary year, we seem to have landed no only on our feet but in a better life as well. Things could have been very different. I am not particularly deft with money (those of you who know me well may enjoy your chuckle at the degree to which I am understating things) and I was afraid that I had permanently locked myself into renting. It can be cheaper to own, but you have to be able to save money to buy and it’s hard to do that when you’re renting…it’s a hell of a treadmill.

I’ll leave with this: If you have an opportunity and urge to buy, or you are in a position to refinance, now is a great time to do so. I’d never paid much attention to interest rates (see above paragraph) but apparently they’re as low now as they’ve been in the last fifty years.