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.
