The House, She Be Sold
Part of the American dream is owning your own home. Conversely, part of the American nightmare must be selling a home as I have recently experienced.
Home ownership is great, you get more room than in an apartment, you get your own yard, and best of all, your monthly payments are actually building you equity instead of building equity for your landlord. I loved having a home, I can't wait until I can get another. But selling a home was, for lack of a better term, a bitch.
It was never for lack of someone wanting to buy my house, I had an offer within a week of having it on the market. But it seemed that people just couldn't get the financing they needed.
In the glory days of only a few years ago, banks would give out loans without a second thought. People bought homes left and right, flipping them for major profits. And then the market fell out… banks took baths on loans and not-so-savvy entrepreneurs were left with homes and condos that they couldn't sell, or worse still, that they owed more on than they were worth. Times were bad.
It was about the time that this bad time began that I determined I was going nowhere at my current job position (not to mention hating every day there a little more) and opted to finally move away from a tiny town into the big city. I felt a little like Clark Kent moving from Smallville to Metropolis, minus the super powers and spandex outfit.
So my home, which I intended to own for at least five years, ended up getting put up on the market after just two (which thankfully is the amount of time you must live in a home to sell it and not have to pay taxes on it). And it couldn't have been put on the market at a worse time.
I had started to run down the entire realty debacle but realized this could stretch to several pages and is full of many uninteresting details (though I did squeeze in one more Superman reference). I'll just say that I had three approved offers fall through for financing issues, medical issues, and finally financial issues again. Thankfully after initially being turned down, the third time buyers managed to finagle some financing for the home and my check is now in the mail and the house is now in their possession.
It hasn't fully set in, nor will it probably do so until I have the check cashed and a giant bag of money in my hands. I put the home for sale in October and since then I have been paying rent on an apartment (since I could not afford two houses at once) and my old house. The financial ramifications of that have been weighing on me greatly, I've been unable to save (and in fact have lost) money during this time and it has been really though having to worry about every expense because I never knew how long I would have to keep maintaining two locations. It's like a giant weight has been crushing me for the past eight months but that is finally lifted.
I can't wait to buy another home though, and hopefully this time I can stick to five years of ownership with it, maybe more if I really like the place. Sadly I had to renew the lease on my apartment before everything with my home was closed, so I'm destined to be apartment living for one more year. But at least, finally, I won't have to worry so much about the almighty dollar.
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