my mid week weekend

I now have Tuesday and Wednesday off every week. How did I swing that? Well I work every other weekend. As much as I dislike my job, it at least gives me the flexibility to work basically whenever I want to. I work the days that Jessica has off so that we don't have to pay for day care. I work long days in the week and work every other weekend. The only down side is that I don't get a day off with Jessica ever. I am hoping that it won't last too long though. Anyway, on Tuesday, I basically did a lot of stuff for the house. My loan guy stopped by I got to sign about 5378 forms. Give or take. Someone from my realtor also stopped by so that I could sign some other forms and a home appraiser stopped by followed by a termite inspector. No termites. That'll save me some money.

WARNING!

If you ever plan on buying and then selling a house, please keep these things in mind:

1. Buy a house in an area with good growth potential. If you buy a house in an area that will soon be over run by low income minorities, your house will lose value. I have nothing against living near low income minorities myself, but apparently many house seekers do. We are selling for more than we bought the house for, but only because of the improvements I've made.

2. When making an accepting an offer to sell your house, it is not necessarily the final offer. After the home inspection, the buyer can change the offer to include repair costs. For example, we have to give the guy buying out house $2000 for a new roof. Basically, we're fucked because we already made an offer on our new house and if we back out of the sale of our current house, we will have two houses, which we can't afford.

3. If you are in an area with several homes for sale, even if you have the best house, you are at a disadvantage. If you can, try to sell when there are no other houses for sale in your area. Otherwise, the buyer has all of the leverage. It sucks.

4. When you buy a house, make sure that it is something that will last you for more than three years. After three years in our house, we have enough equity to break even (give or take a couple hundred dollars) but it would have been nice to have enough so that we could make some profit. Also, make sure that your loan fits your needs. Our loan primarily had us paying interest and very little went to out principle.

5. Make sure that you have enough time to move. The way my contracts worked out, we may only have a day to move out of our house. I'm trying to get this fixed, but will be hard pressed to move out if I can't buy some time.

All in all, this has been one of the most stressful and bothersome experiences of my life. The only thing that has helped at all is the fact that my realtor kick ass. The selling agent is bending over backwards to make the sale of our house happen and the agent that has been showing us houses has been working her ass off to find us just the right place. We've probably seen over 40 houses. I would think that she'd get sick of showing us houses by now. Which brings me to probably the biggest thing about buying a house: BE PICKY. It is going to be your home for a long time. Make sure that it will fit your needs for a long time. Anyway, I am putting a link to my realtor's web site on this page. Honesty, they are great. If you know nothing about buying a house, they will hold your hand the whole way.