Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Home Buying 101

About five years ago we purchased our first home. Here’s a little bit of what I wish I knew then BEFORE we purchased our home.

If you know you are not going to stay in a home for at least 5 years DO NOT BUY! I didn’t know this even though I did a lot of research prior to buying. We knew we had about 3 and a half years and thought that once Jared was in his last few months of residency we would just list the house and boom it would sell. WELL, we listed the house for 3 months prior to his graduation and received not one offer. Not even a low ball offer! We found renters at the 99th hour that paid for our mortgage, property taxes and homeowners insurance. That was a blessing. TODAY our home is back on the market and we are looking for renters. We have no idea if it will be sold or if we will find renters in the next 10 days. Once September 1 reaches we will be footing the bill for everything and wondering if and when we will be relieved from this burden. Research shows that it takes about 5 years for you to break even with your home…NOT make a profit, but break even! Let’s think about this for a moment, if I buy a house for $200K and sell for $200K, why do I need to wait five years just for that to happen? Well let’s look at a breakdown of the expenses we had in just our 3 years of owning a home.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Parenting is Hard Sometimes

Hello blog! I know, it has been a WHILE since I last posted! Shrew!

So the latest, I am 17 weeks pregnant and Jayce is turning two…More like the TERRIBLE two. OMG, I feel like I am loosing my mind sometimes.  Parenting can be so rewarding and yet at the same time so frustrating!! Ugh! It’s also something that really highlights our inadequacies.  I lack so greatly in patience and tolerance sometimes. This is the stage for testing boundaries and being very demanding. His new thing now is saying, “mine! Mine! Mine!” And if you don’t give it to him its meltdown mania! It’s constant battle of redirection and ignoring foolishness. But sometimes it’s hard to ignore…And sometimes, though you understand intellectually what’s happening, emotionally you are on a tight rope!