God is My Cosigner
I think that maybe God has a lower tolerance for listening to me over-evaluate things than I would have expected. Last week I mentioned that God was complaining about my pickiness in looking at houses, this week I chose one and am now in the massive paperwork and escrow process. The thing is, I probably shouldn’t have really gotten a house this nice in today’s market for the money I had to spend; that’s why I suspect that God just got tired of my endless circular arguments. Does this house have enough space for everything I own? Can I live with the terrible flow patterns of this one? That house is really nice but it is both more than I can probably afford and adds too much time to my daily commute.
It’s not that any of my arguments were wrong, and it’s not that I was despondent or anything, it’s just that I’d keep revisiting the same arguments for the same houses, over and over again, always hoping that I’d discover some redeeming thing that I’d missed but never actually finding one. So I’d move back to the start of the list. Now the list did keep changing, since houses are selling pretty quick right here and now, so houses that I’d almost committed to would drop away and I’d have to take another, harder, look at one that I’d already passed on. Should I really have passed on it? Are my hopes just out of line with my budget and I really need to tone them back and look again? Should I change my mind about my insistence on not needing mortgage insurance? After all, the market is finally rising so I could refinance in a year or two or accelerate payments to get below that magic 80% of loan to value number.
And that’s what I’ve been doing relentlessly for the last week and a half.
So I think God nudged the market a little. I was waiting in my car outside a house that I really wanted to see, but probably couldn’t quite afford, when my agent called to let me know that the house I was at had gone off the market earlier that day. This wasn’t the first time that had happened, and, remember, I’d only been looking less than two weeks. Then he went on. He’d seen another house earlier that day that had just come on the market and he thought it might be what I was looking for.
He was right.
Not only was he right, but the sellers were apparently interested in getting a quick deal, which means they weren’t necessarily going to get the best price, so maybe I could afford it. They were taking offers right away, not waiting to do an open house, not setting a day for comparing all comers. Somebody was already working up an offer and if we wanted to have a shot we needed to get in on the same day. So I made an offer. I made an offer notably lower than what my agent recommended, but only a smidge over my comfort zone. We tweaked some things, we offered some perks that didn’t affect the price but which might make us more attractive, and we made sure that we showed that I was good for what I said.
Mine was the third offer, they held up until nine at night to give us time to finish writing it up. I don’t know any of the details of the other offers but they picked mine. The house is, to my tastes anyway, much nicer than ones I’d seen that were listed at higher prices, so life is good. I’m happy and God’s happy, now I just have to make it through escrow.
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