Closed!
Another reason I’ve been quiet lately is that if I’d been noisy, CavLec would have become an endless round of fretting about the house sale. Which, thank $DEITY, closed today and is over and done with and the check is in the mail (and I have to figure out what to do with the darn thing once I get it, but that’s another story altogether).
The City of Madison decided to rip up the street in front of my house just in time for the sale. Thanks a ton, Madison. Wasn’t sure I’d ever sell it.
Add to that my entrenched position as a housing bear—I think housing is in for a slide, be that via rapid price crash or a decade of zero appreciation—and you have one very nervous Dorothea.
I cut my price. I cut my price hard and fast. It was the right thing to do (no, I really don’t care that I’ve messed up my neighbors’ comps—they can just bug the city for lower property taxes), and it’s turning out fine. Sure, that extra mumble-thousand would have been nice, but we can live without it. The eventual price we settled on with our buyers was twenty thousand more than one vulture-carcass investor offered us, so I’m going to call it a win, you know what I mean?
And I think the buyers will emerge whole from this, too, despite my bearishness on housing. They’ll have some equity from the start, and they don’t seem to be in a crazy sleaze-loan. This makes me happy, because I loved my little house in Madison and I don’t want its next owners to hate it.
(Definition of “crazy sleaze-loan:” Any loan with “interest-only” or “option” in its name, and most ARMs, too. Any loan involving negative amortization, certainly. If you’ve got one of these, you’re crazy, the person who got you the loan is a sleaze, and you need to get out now. If you have to sell the house to get out, sell. Better than being upside-down on a loan in a bear housing market.)
So this post is my big sigh of relief. We’re out of the house, we’re completely out of debt (gosh, yeah, that feels good), and we’re solvent and liquid. These are all very good things.