Ramblings of a Wednesday

Well, I promised I would share more about our experience with home buying, so if you are a young couple/person who is looking to buy a home you may want to read this! The home we wanted to buy was through HUD, it was a foreclosure because we really wanted a fixer upper. Josh had flipped a house while we were engaged, and it was success, so we knew we were capable of doing it ourselves to our own home. We thought it would be a fun project and we had lots of time until our lease was up to make our home just the way we wanted it!

Anyway, this is our experience, we don't have anything against any organization or anything, we just want people to be aware of what can happen. When you are new to the business of realty, it can be really tricky and confusing. So, we had made an offer and were required to put down $500 in a check made out to HUD and to ourselves because we were able to have an inspection within 72 hours and rescind should the inspection go poorly. We had our inspection the same day our paperwork was accepted and found that there was WAY more work than we realized. We knew a lot about working on foreclosed houses, but there are things we don't know about and concrete is one of them. This house in particular had a lot of concrete work that needed to be done and didn't realize it. The biggest concrete problem was that the garage was in the ground because the house was on a hill. The retaining walls needed to be redone immediately because they were in very bad shape and would cost an extremely hefty sum, and really need to be done by a professional. So, once we found all of that out, along with a number of other undisclosed problems, we decided to rescind our offer. We knew we would be putting money into a foreclosure, but at some point it is silly to invest too much! You never want to invest more than the house is actually worth, or your home is no longer an asset to you.

Anyway, we went that day to rescind our offer and found out that we may not be able to get our $500 back! We were shocked!! Both our realtor and the paperwork seemed to promise our money back. We were so upset, because although we would be fine, $500 is A LOT of money! It would be coming from our house nest egg, but still that is a HUGE house payment that we would be missing out on from that fund. We were pretty upset, and still haven't found out for sure either way. We wrote an appeal as to why we believed we were to get our money back, and will hopefully find out soon. Until then, we will continue to house hunt and steer clear of government owned properties. We will stick with the bank from now on, or owners for that matter. I will keep you updated, and we will keep praying that our perfect house will find us soon. We know that God has a greater plan for us, and even if our money doesn't see it's way back to us we know there is something in God's plan that we don't understand.

I hate to be all gloomy..so on a happy note.....I finished my first hand knitted baby blanket! It turned out really well and I will be posting pictures asap :) Hope you are all having a great week!!!