Random

How about some random updates?

No offer yet from the second showing people. We've answered all the questions they gave us so I guess we wait and see now. We have another showing tonight too. We're still crossing our fingers!

I updated our budget Monday night. We're less than $2 over our restaurant budget for the month. Not too bad! We don't need to eat out before the end of the month so we should be able to keep it there. We're also under on gas, food and household so we should be able to end the month under budget. Our discretionary is over but that's because we've spent some money this month on the house. We bought a new curtain rod for the kids' room. And C finished the kitchen backsplash. I think it looks great.
I'll take money out of our short term savings account for those purchases. Overall it hasn't been too bad of a month. Can you believe it's almost the end of June already!

Walking and Moving

Tonight I'm signing up for the Heart Walk. You're all right. It's $90 very well spent. Thank you for helping me get over my frugal ways for this important cause.

We have had five showings on our house since it went on the market Wednesday evening. We had a sixth showing that was actually a second showing! And that couple is interested! They have some questions which I am bringing forward to our homeowners association this evening. I'm hoping we can clear those hurdles and that they'll like the house enough to make an offer!

Everything else is good in our neck of the woods. We've tried to do free things while we have to be out of the house for all these showings. Only once did we spend money - Friday evening when we had a showing over dinner so we went out to eat. We introduced the kids to Japanese food and spent $50 at a local Japanese grill and sushi place. It was very tasty! That probably put us over our restaurant budget for the month though. I'll know for sure tonight when I update our budget.

Oh, one last thing about our house...every realtor has said we're priced at market value! That's great news. We listed at $219,900 and our mortgage balance is at $220,206. Hopefully we can move out of this house with only a little money out of our pockets!

On the Market

Our house will officially be listed on the MLS system today. We decided to list it at $219,900. We're crossing our fingers that showings and ultimately an offer comes in soon!

I've been all house talk lately. We do have other things going on. The kids started their summer sports this week. It's so cute to watch them learn how to catch or learn the rules of soccer or run around the field with a football tucked under their arm.

A neighbor girl of ours is five years old and has had 6 open heart and lung surgeries due to a birth defect. She's scheduled for her next surgery this fall to replace a valve with a custom made one just for her. My daughter plays with this little girl daily and we've grown to love the family and their daughter. Coming up on the 26th is a Heart Walk and they've asked all their family and friends (including us) to join them. In order to attend, it will cost our family $80 in walk entrance fees or $90 if we sign A and J up for the kids fun run. That is expensive to us. I've been waffling about signing up. But then I think about this little girl and her enormous heart problems and I feel so incredibly grateful for my healthy children. I would give every physical possession of mine and all the money in the bank to keep them healthy. Is $90 too much to help with research to help other little kids like our neighbor? I'm leaning towards no.

6/14/11 House Update

Anyone sick of house updates yet? It's really all that's going in our lives right now so I'm a bit one-track minded lately. (We did sign up for the Minneapolis Warrior Dash though. It's a 5K obstacle course race in July. Think running through mud, over hay bales, rappelling down hills and jumping through fire! It cost us almost $100 to sign us both up! Yikes! It will be fun to do together though!)

OK, back to the house. On Sunday we finalized our list of options that we wanted in the new house (Silestone counter tops, engineered hardwood floors, ceramic tile in all the baths and mud room, upgraded carpet, sprinkler system, nice railings instead of half walls on the stairs, bay window in breakfast nook, etc.) and everything totaled up to $329,030. We then submitted an offer to the builder of $300,000 and he took it! The new house is a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 3 car garage house in a new development with no association and is around 2500 square feet with another 1000 square feet of basement that we can finish in the future. That's the perfect size house for our family of five I think! And the price is exactly where we want it! And it has a nice shaded backyard perfect for a playground with room for a big patio and garden too! For comparison, almost six years ago when we built our current house we paid $274.5k and that was without appliances, paint, flooring on the main level and the upstairs bathrooms as we did all that ourselves with sweat equity. Our current house is 1700 square feet. We're getting so much more house and yard for only a bit more money! Our monthly mortgage payment should not increase very much. We're super excited.

Of course now the hurdle is selling our current house. If you remember a month or so ago we had a realtor come to our house and without doing any comps he told us he could sell the house at $199.9k. Our current mortgage on the house is $220.2k. We were disappointed with that number. We had a second realtor come out last week and he did a full market analysis and told us we should list our house at $209k but most of his comps were short sales or lender owned houses. That was a better number and something we were willing to take on money-wise.

Through all of this our neighbors have been debating on whether to join us in selling and maybe even moving with us to our new neighborhood! They have had 2 realtors come through their house and both of them have told them they should list their house much, much higher than what the realtors have told us. They have an identical floor plan to us but they have finished their basement. The basement should get them about $10-$15k more in price. So, last night we did some looking on MLS and do think we could put our house on the market for more. We've asked our realtor (the second one) to re-do the market analysis with higher priced comps. We see him tonight and we'll talk and agree on a listing price for our house then. I do not like realtors. Sure, you could sell my house at $199k or $209k. It's a bargain then more than likely! Can you sell it at $225k? It's probably going to take more work and it's only going to get you an additional $500 in commission but it's going to get us $15-20k more! If we're not happy with what he has to say this afternoon then I think we're prepared to find a new realtor.

Anyway, that's where it all stands. Contingent purchase agreement is in place on the new house. Our current house should be listed before the end of the week. And now here's to hoping that someone loves our house and wants to buy it quickly!

A sign?

Monday night as I went to bed weighing the pros and cons of moving over and over in my mind, I prayed to God, asking for a sign. Should we take the leap and move? How is the money going to work? Am I putting my family at too much risk by taking most of our cash savings and spending it?

Tuesday night when I arrived home from work I went and retrieved the mail. In the mail was a letter from the Minnesota Department of Revenue. I immediately thought "Oh no, we're being audited!" That was not the case though. Our governor passed a bill earlier this year affecting our 2010 taxes and hey, look at that! We're getting a refund of $2149! We paid in over $2600 and our taxes owed were only ~$450. The check hasn't arrived yet. The letter said that would come separately.

Is this my sign? All that money is going directly to savings for now. It might just go to a new house though too.

New House Limbo

I haven't blogged in a while. Things just got crazy there for a moment and they're not really slowing down. There were birthdays and end of school parties and picnics and of course just normal daily life with three small children. C started his first class, and boy is it a time suck! I never did a May budget report although I do have all the data for it. It just never got posted. I could still do that. And maybe I will.

But what's taking most of my brain power these days is housing. We're back in new house limbo. Do we move? Do we not move? After that initial moving bug got in our systems, we just haven't been able to shake it. So the house in our neighborhood didn't work out but then I was talking with a friend and she mentioned a new development near her that didn't have an association tied to it. Intriguing! I stopped by the model home on a whim and left with a packet of information, house plans and a map of the available lots. I brought them home and showed them to C and he was immediately interested.

Since then we've been pouring over details, creating spreadsheets full of numbers and dreaming of a potential brand new house. We had a realtor come over and do a full market analysis for us. There are only 6 other 2 story homes in our town and the two neighboring towns on the market right now at our price point. And at least 4 of those are short sales. He thinks we could raise the price on our house $10k over what the first realtor, who did not do any comparisons with other houses on the market, told us.

We've been e-mailing with the new house sales rep to go over pricing and options and asking all sorts of questions. We have another meeting with him on Saturday to go over a few more things and we might, we just might, make a contingent offer on Saturday for the new house. And then we may put our current house on the market in a week or so.

It's all very exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. (Where do we live if our current house sells but the new house isn't done yet?)

Yes, we would deplete our savings in order to make this happen. To some (most?) that would be a no go. To us, it's not off the table. We're considering it.

May 2011 Month End

Good-bye May. You treated us fairly. It was a good month. Here's where the money stands:

Debts:

Truck Loan: $22,882.60 (-$440.05) - Regular payment made. No extra payments will be made here with a 0% loan!

Savings:

Emergency Fund: $11,556.54 (+1,885.57) - Thank you raise! My raise is significantly helping us with our savings. In addition to that we had over $300 in snowflakes this month! C brought home more money this month than in the past couple and everything just went right for us. We had minimum extra expenses this month which also helped. June won't see as big a gain but anything in the 4 digit range is awesome!

Short Term Savings: $332.69 (-47.02) - We took some money out of this account this month to pay for some of the house stuff we're doing. Some of it went to new mulch for the 8 trees on our yard. Some of it went to the kitchen backsplash project. I love having a little bit of play money in this account to do or purchase some extras.

Travel Fund: $486.47 (+75.40) - Vacation is next month! We are supposed to be gone from Sunday through Saturday of the week of the 4th of July. Unfortunately C found out yesterday at his first class that he has a lab test the Wednesday of that week. It couldn't be more inconvenient, being smack dab in the middle of our vacation and all when we're going to be about a 9 hour car ride from home. We're unsure right now what we're going to do. (We had originally scheduled the vacation for this week assuming C would be taking a different class that would have ended in June. That didn't happen and he took a different class instead and now we have a conflict. Time to decide what to do!)

Christmas Savings: $449.42 (+75.37) - Christmas savings is right on track!

Basement Finishing Fund: $130.05 (+0.11) - Some day basement you will be finished!

Tuition Fund: $9,820.03 (-800.88) - And there went our first tuition payment! C also purchased books totaling almost $200. He's hoping to sell his book after the class is over. On Half.com he should be able to make almost all his money back. I am so grateful we have this tuition money saved so we can pay his tuition with cash instead of with credit! (OK, so we technically did pay with credit so we could get the cash back and then we paid the credit card with cash from this account. Details, details!)

NetWorth:

Assets:
Savings: $26.5k (INGDirect subaccounts plus 529's)
Retirement: $256.6k (my 401k, my pension lump sum, C's company stock, C's Roth IRA)
House & Vehicles: $234.7k (house, truck, car, two motorcycles)

Liabilities:
Mortgage & Truck Loans: $243.6k

Networth = 26.5k + 256.6k + 234.7k - 243.6k = $274.2k - Our network rebounded this month thanks to a boost in my pension amount. Our savings went up a little and our assets stayed about the same. Unfortunately, our 529, 401ks and Roth IRA accounts all actually went down a little this month even though we put money into them. That's unfortunate but the stock market is what it is. I'm grateful for any rise in our networth though. Our networth is higher now than I've ever seen it. We're on the right track!