crosswordbebop

It has been six weeks since we sold our house and moved into our motor coach. If you read our previous blog "Homeless" you know it was quite a shock moving from 3,000 to 300 square feet. The idea of living in our motor coach for 6 to 9 months while we build our next home was a great plan as we sat around the dining room table of our old house. The good news is that it gets better. To bring you up to speed, we now have electricity as of two weeks ago but still do not have running water. When we were showering in the motor home, our 85 gallon water holding tank would last us about one week. Tuesday was our day to take the motor home out to empty our tanks and fill up with fresh water. We changed our ways two weeks ago. We now get up at 5:00 am to head out to the Campus Wellness and Recreation Center (CRWC) for a work out and morning shower. We can now stretch our 85 gallons out for one month. Lessons learned over the past 6 weeks: 1. Running water and el...

This week we closed on the sale of what had been our home for 19 years. Going through a packing frenzy of moving life-long belongings and wanting to pass on a sparkling, clean adobe; the moment caught me completely off-guard. I am not an emotional person, but upon the final signature at the closing, I burst into tears and hugged the new owners of our home where we had raised our family. I was passing a part of us on to these newly-met out-of-towners. Over the course of the day, I went from exhaustion, -to tears, -to exhilaration. For the first time in three decades, we were mortgage-free. It felt gypsy-like. Think of how close the moment of being totally debt free. This summer, we purchased five acres out in the country, have our orchard started, a vegetable garden in, 41 grape vines underway and four hens laying eggs – but no house. Not wanting to risk two mortgages, we made the decision that we would sell our current home before building our next home. And in the interim? We would ma...

We are just about to close on the selling of our home of 19 years and I was wondering what the appreciation was over the past two decades. This was inspired because my realtor keeps reminding me of how much I paid compared to our selling price. The actual cost can get really complicated ( considering home improvements, tax benefits, repairs and maintenance, etc.) but I wanted to keep it simple. I took our purchase price as the present value and our selling price minus realtor fees and updates to the house for selling as our future value. The 19 years of compounding yields a whopping 2.2% return on our house. I know all of you finance people want to look at my investment (down payment) and calculate the return based on that, with tax advantage on interest, also calculating in home repairs and maintenance, but that gets complicated really fast, and I don't have all of those records (shame on me). But this shows that our house appreciated an average of 2.2% over 19 years or about the...

Spring is the time for love, the groundhog to see or not see his shadow and time to buy or sell a house. This year we are selling our house. We want to move to the country and have chickens, a goat, maybe a llama, fruit trees, and a big garden. As empty nesters, we don’t need to be close to the schools, and our current home is in the perfect neighborhood to raise a family. As this is my first time selling a home, I am learning a lot about trying to maximize your selling potential. Here are a few lessons learned: It takes time, energy and effort to get a house ready to show . We have spent the last few weeks cleaning, repairing, editing, and donating things we no longer need. Good Will and Habitat Restore are great places to take your good-slightly used items that you no longer need. To clean, organize and minimize can be revitalizing. Make repairs when things break . We had to replace two bedroom doors. It wasn’t a big deal to replace them. To think, we lived with our “slighted bruised...

We found another mini-vacation site only 35 miles from where we live. It is the Ladora Bank Bistro , in no other place than Ladora, Iowa, population 286. Proprietors, Brad Erickson and Colleen Klainert purchased the 1920-built “jewel box” style bank and turned it into a bistro of fine wine, phenomenal food and an atmosphere that an old banker loves. The structure maintains its marble teller windows and the iron teller cages, original wood floors and the two original vaults, now being used as a wine cellar and a kitchen storage closet. Engraved in the wall, next to the 24 foot high ceilings are four pillar statements that warm my heart: “Frugality is the the Parent of Fortune” “Integrity in the Companion of Success” “Wealth is the Achievement of Thrift” “Diligence is the Mother of Virtue” On the outside of the bank, above the entrance etched in stone reads “ The wealth of this community embodies the richness of her soil, the integrity, frugality and diligence of her p...