So let’s tell a little story. I moved in with Mrs. Weer’d a year before we were married, and we got a reasonable apartment in Medford Massachusetts. (Well it seemed damned expensive for the guy moving from Portland Maine from the neighborhood where I was one of the only white faces on the street, and everybody spoke the Somali dialect of Arabic. It was VERY reasonable for the lady moving from a cramped studio in Cambridge Mass)
Two years later our landlord informed us they didn’t want to be dealing with the property any more, and their best bet was to turn the double-decker we lived in into a pair of Condos. They gave us first refusal to buy our unit and their ask price was their rock bottom, not their list, which was a nice gesture. We got pre-approved for a loan, and looked at the market and decided that while the price we were quoted was a damn good price for a Condo in Medford in our neighborhood by Tufts University, but there were towns further away from Boston, or neighborhoods less ritzy as ours where we could get loads more for our money. Plus I must say owning a Condo is the absolute worst of owning a home (ie if something breaks you don’t have a landlord to call, and if you get sick of the space or your neighborhood you have to sell the home you can’t just break the lease and walk) and the worst of renting (You still have neighbors that share walls with you, and you can’t just knock out a wall and build on without getting the OK from the other people in the condo association).
So we let the owners know we’d be bailing when the lease was up, and we started going to open houses. It didn’t take long before we realized we weren’t going to be happy buying a house we could AFFORD. (Key word there) so we grabbed another apartment.
The new place was also nice and we weren’t paying much more on rent. Still this was just an apartment we were staying at to SAVE MONEY so we could finally not only buy a house, but buy a house we both wanted and could AFFORD. (See a trend here?)
When the housing market crashed all it did was bump our plans ahead. We bought when the market was still dropping. We got a fixed rate mortgage that’s monthly payment was slightly more than our rent at our apartment. Not only that but we had cash so we could fix up the house and make it so we loved it. This is not a starter home. The wife and I were talking about how the town is doing a walk through of the historic cemeteries on Friday when I’ll be in Maine. I said it was no big deal as I’m not moving again. I’ll do it next year.
So yeah we were hoping to buy at the bottom of the market…as you know, in many places home values are still dropping, but we did buy low, and took advantage of a buyer’s market. Still none of this shit mattered to us, we bought a house we liked and planned to stay in for the long haul, and we could afford the mortgage payments, and those payments were fixed. The market could drop for another 10 years and we wouldn’t have to do shit.
Still we did re-fiance which was 100% win-win, as our payments went down, and it turned out the work we did on the house actually gave us more equity, and again the new lower rate is fixed.
Of course Obama is again looking to bail out those who didn’t do what we did.
Kinda pisses me off that we’ve been pinching pennies and squirreling away cash while people have been just buying whatever they wanted and the ACLU-shy banks would co-sign for, and then get some love from the socialist-in-chief.
Its almost like its stupid to be an adult these days.
I believe the correct question would be “Who is John Galt?”
Indeed, that tipping point is getting closer and closer if we keep going on this trajectory.
For right now I’ll root for Herman Cain and hope for the best.
It’s only stupid to act like a grown up if you buy all the blather that Obama is selling.
He re-wrote that “Ant and the Grasshopper” fable a long time ago.
I got a fixed rate mortgage and through various ways was able to pay it off in 5 yrs. Even were I still paying on it, we would be able to. But those (mostly) who were stupid want the gov’t to bail them out.
Ours got reset to 30 years, but despite it costing less we’re paying the same to pay it down faster, and so we can fall back to the regular payment if we need a cushion.
Pretty much what we did.
Except our landlord pissed us off by refusing to do repairs so we moved on as little notice as I could legally manage, and as a goodby gift sent a letter off to the local housing folks about the repair work that wasn’t being done, and for how long, cause she was trying to find someone to move in the day after we moved out without doing a single repair (we had a major fire hazard in the kitchen, moldy ceiling tiles falling off the bathroom ceiling, and a major piece of building support structure fallen over and lying on the basement floor, and thats just the major stuff).
We looked at finances, and the market, and realized we could afford a house that we’d actually like (ok, its not perfect, but wow, its awesome), and said there was NO WAY we’d get another apartment. Ended up with a monthly payment almost the same as our rent was.
Sounds like us. We couldn’t wait to get out of our apartment. Mortgage was close enough to the rent as makes no difference. The apartment management wouldn’t fix anything for us either; we always had to fend for ourselves.
Oh, and another LOL point, that management company is being sued because the whole complex isn’t ADA-compliant. The complete package: not enough handicapped spaces, what spaces there are aren’t properly marked, ground-floor doors are too narrow for wheelchair access…. You name it, they’re getting hit for it. Read that in the local news and laughed, although the poor residents will probably see a spike in lease rates to compensate.
Take great solace in the fact that you not only have acted responsibly, but in the fact that you understand and took advantage of a free market economy while one still exists. Enjoy your home, make it your castle, and defend it to the last!!!
Disavowed With Honor