Friday, June 04, 2010

Back to Where We Started

In 2001, nine years ago, we had been able to save ten thousand dollars and we used it as a down payment on our first house.

We made around 60K when we sold it in 2004 (of course a significant portion went towards commission, closing costs etc) and we used most of it to buy our second house (down payment and closing).

We also sold our second house with a nice profit (over 70K, perhaps?) in 2007 and then bought our third house which was way more expensive than the first two (triple the value of the first, double the second). K also used part of the money to buy the Mazda 3.

The rest of the story is history -- K lost his job, went back and then decided to go back to academia. The house was a fixer upper which needed tons of work (siding, roof, flooring, etc) and although we couldn't afford the renovations, we had to do them anyway in order to put the house on the market. That meant some (cc) debt that we've been "rolling over" switching from one zero interest card to another. Our trip to Brazil and other expenses caused debt on another card -- one we've been paying interest on.

In sum, this was the situation we found ourselves in when we put our house on the market a second time this year (last year it didn't sell and we applied for a mortgage renegotiation).

The result? We came away from the closing with exactly the 10K we had nine years ago when we bought our first house. I've already paid the first cc and as soon as the car sells we're paying the second one.

We're going to start again from scratch now and hopefully we'll succeed. We've been very fortunate in all this and whatever wrong decisions we've made have been OK in the long run.

OK, gotta go to bed because we're traveling to VA tomorrow morning (we decided not to go today, we're just too tired). I'm glad that this part of the move is over and... you know, I think I'm almost looking forward to unpacking! (I may be out of my mind right now! :-D ).

1 comment:

  1. I just wanted to let you know that I've been keeping up with you this week. I hope tomorrow's drive is smooth and uneventful. Take care, my friend.

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