Selling Our House Blues

As the numbers show, we only paid off a small amount of debt last month. From our January statement to our February statement, on our credit card, we paid off only $516.48 after stupid tax, er… interest was added. Combined with our car payment, our total debt payoff for the month was $861.48. Barely a drop in the bucket, only 2.8% of our debt total.

And more sadly, in the months going forward, we aren’t going to do much better. We are in the very beginning stages of selling our home. We live in a small 2 bed room home and we have two kids: a boy and a girl. Because of this, it was time to either buy a larger home or add-on. After weighing the pros and cons of each option, we decided that even though we love our home, the things we didn’t like about it out-weighed the things we did, mostly location and neighbors, two things we can’t change.

Because we are now looking to put our home on the market in the near future (<6 weeks), we need to start saving every penny to go towards some last minute home repairs and for good faith money when we are ready to put an offer in on another home.

In order to make our home sale ready we need to finish up a few things. Since the kitchen remodel, we haven’t yet finished the trim. We need baseboards and window sills in the kitchen, baseboards in the living area, window coverings in the whole house, and some small cosmetic issues in the front yard need to be taken care of.

The baseboards and window sills will probably take the longest. They need to be painted, measured, and installed. Then, after installation, they will need to be touched up. For the window coverings, we are going to go to Home Depot and buy the 2-inch faux wood blinds, in white, and put them throughout the house. Lastly, for the exterior, we need to take down a dilapidated fence, patch some siding, possibly paint, and add some landscaping: flowers, mulch, etc.  The only other thing we will probably do before we sell is rototill and put sod in the backyard.

In order to finance these home improvements, and in order to give us some money in the bank, we are taking out a loan against The Husband’s 401K. We are trying to take out $15000 over 5 years with the intent to pay it back, at least mostly, with the sale of our current home.  We are planning to spend about $5000 to get our house ready for sale and then the remainder will be money in the bank that we can use as good faith money or just as an emergency fund. Again, we plan to pay the 401K loan back pretty quickly.

We met with three realtors in the last week. Each of them had some pros and cons. Interestingly, each of them will only charge us 5% commission (as opposed to the industry norm of 6%). There was one lady who was very kind, but she failed to tell us how she would market our house. That left us with two options. We are still debating them both, but are leaning one way.

Due to the size of our house, namely the fact that is only has 2 bedrooms, we have to sell and buy something larger. In addition to being in the early stages of starting to get ready to list our home, we are starting to look, very casually, at homes.

We have a wish list. We have to have a minimum of a 3 bedroom, 2 bathrooms. We want a fireplace. It has to be on a pretty quiet street. It has to have a 2 car attached garage. Overall, we aren’t too picky. It just has to meet our current needs.

We are hoping to make enough money of the sale of our current home, to put 10% on whatever we choose to buy. We need to sell our home for a minimum of $310,000 in order to be able to do that. Looking at current market conditions, we should be able to make right around that, and with any luck, more.

We are very casually looking at homes online. It is giving us a barometer for what we want and need.

This crazy time is making debt payments nearly impossible. I will still pay all my normal monthly bills, but I won’t be throwing everything extra at my debt. I do want to pay the small debt to my friend, and the bill to my brother, but after that, I will only be making minimum payments. All extra money will be funneled into our savings account for the short term. Once we are pre-approved for a house and put an offer in, we will get back to paying off our debt.