Gather Little by Little

We’re going to Disneyland!

Okay, not quite, but the prospect of facing the next month without a house payment, insurance premium, property tax, gas bill, water bill, heating bill, softwater rental bill and other miscellaneous maintenance costs sounds like a trip to paradise – or at least a couple of days off.

Last week, we closed on the home that we have not lived in for sixteen months. The closing documents were overnighted to us earlier in the week and Mrs. Stew and I signed the papers, had them notarized and then sent them back across the country with our fingers crossed and our hearts in prayer.

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Someday, I hope to own another home, but not until I am good and ready. We are quite happy with our rental situation at the moment.

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I am on the road once again and my internet is a little shaky, so I am not going to run the post that I had originally planned for today. Furthermore, Sheila asked for a housing update on this post and since there have been some developments, I thought I would write about our house once again.

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We haven’t fully given up selling our house, but we’ve entered into a contract with a property management company. Our old house is for sale and for rent at the same time. The really good news is that we have a potential tenant already and if all goes well, they should sign a lease this week. No more stressing about two mortgages!

Property Management Companies

Property management companies are companies that take care of “land lording” and marketing your rental house for you. They do this in exchange for a % of your monthly rent, and depending on the company they may charge additional property management fees as well. Here are just some of the services provided by typical property management companies:

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Back in September, I wrote an article providing tips on how to sell your home fast in a buyer’s market. These tips and suggestions were not only things I had personally done to the home we’re trying to sell, but also tips and suggestions from multiple real estate agents, friends, family and a significant amount of research and reading that I did on the internet.

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As I sit here in my favorite easy chair, typing away on my laptop in the cool quiet morning, I’m surrounded by cardboard. All of our belongings are safely packed away in various sized cardboard boxes. Our shelves are bare, cabinets empty, and surprisingly there are no toys on the floor. It’s all so weird. We’ve lived in this house for more than 11 years. We’ve brought 4 of our 6 children home to this house to raise them. We’ve watched them grow here inside these walls. Over those 11 years, this physical wooden box we call a house has managed to become a part of us. A place of safety and security. A place of laughter, sadness, of good times and bad.

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I spent the evening reading through the inspection that was done on our new home in the mountains. The inspector that performed the inspection did a very thorough job and put together a report that included tons of pictures (included in this article).

What surprised me was that our mortgage company didn’t require an inspection, only an appraisal. I went ahead and ordered the inspection anyway. In the current housing market, the last thing I wanted to do is move into a home that might potentially have serious problems I wasn’t aware of.

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This is a guest article by HIB who blogs at Happiness is Better about personal finance, real estate investing, early retirement, and being happy. If you enjoy this article, make sure you head over and subscribe to his blog.

Real estate investing is a relatively simple business. It requires a lot of hard work – unlike how it is portrayed on television. Just like anything else, once you have a system in place everything gets a lot easier. The same can be said for any business venture or project whether it’s a blog or a McDonald’s franchise. It’s all about having a system. What follows are some tips and strategies to help you get started. Real estate investing 101 if you will.

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As everyone should know by now, the housing market has tanked. The down market is discussed on the news, in our local and national papers, and is a popular topic for personal finance and investment blogs. A quick search of pfblogs.org returned more than 1,400 results for “housing market”.

Believe it or not, depending on where you live, it’s still possible to sell your home fast even in a buyer’s market. The trick is to make it better looking, easier to buy and easier to move into than anyone else’s home in the market. I’ve learned this through having our house on the market for more than 2 months now.

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Those of you that are frequent readers of Gather Little by Little know that we are have been in the process of selling our home, buying another one and moving over the past 2-3 months. Currently our home is up for sale, and we have a contract on a 4 year old home in the NC mountains that we can’t wait to move in to. Now if we an just sell our current home!

I’ve learned a great deal through this process, and thought I would begin sharing some of those learnings with you. Mind you, I am by no stretch of the imagination a real-estate expert, just an average guy whose learned a few things along the way.

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