|
|
|
|
A New Beginning
|
|
Well the plan is a simple one; it's to sell up and get the hell out of dodge!
Actually it's not all that simple at all; in fact it's complicated and scary. Just about every year the family heads south for the summer, or in fact any other time we can get away with it, and every time we go we talk about how nice it would be to live there. This usually goes on for a week or 2 after each visit and is then dropped until next time, not this time, oh no! This time I was blindsided and double teamed into submission.
There have always been reasoned arguments not to just go and do it, like look how old we are, who would employ us, how could we afford it, what if we lost everything we have worked so hard to achieve over the last 20+ years? In fact when you think about it all of them are excuses not to take a leap into the unknown and all of them are born out of fear.
The facts of the matter are that we are both in little more than minimum wage jobs, neither of which is that secure, we have little to tie us to the area. Well actually not so true for the wife, all her family other than 1 son are here, but me all I have are here with me now. However there is a third party in this, the daughter. Now she is at college and has some concerns all of her own, although not with the idea of going south... maybe she will put them into her own words here.
So after some debate we said lets go for it, after all when you are at the bottom of the heap little things like a recession are hardly noticeable because there is nowhere else to fall.
So we called an estate agent and talked about selling the house. Now the plan was to just sell and go, somewhat naive at the time. See we intended to just sell head south and use some of the equity to pay for maybe 6 months to a year's rental on a place and then look for jobs.
The problem here is that neither of us have ever sold a house before, or rented privately. It seems that people want things like jobs before you rent and jobs with 3 times the rental of the property combined income per month. What is wrong with people, you would think they would be happy with a nice fat wad of money in their back pocket! Never mind we will not be deterred from our goal. We still intend to head south but it's going to take a little longer than we thought; now we will sell and rent here where we still have jobs and then look for work and move.
Actually I say it's going to take longer than we planned, that's not quite true. There is no time scale for any of this, after all who can say if you will sell your house in this day and age. The thing is its set in motion unlike every other time we have thought about doing it. So we figured Christmas is coming let's market the place from the beginning of 2010 cause no one is going to buy before then now are they?
Well all that took place back in August and we made an appointment for the estate agent to return at the beginning of December to that all the paperwork and the HIP could be sorted in readiness for marketing. See now there is no point trying to tie these things down to specific dates, cause well once all the paperwork is in place not being visible on the market even though the chances of anyone taking any notice of you is wasted time. Except someone is taking notice, and someone is coming all the way from Bucks tomorrow to look at our humble abode, and that's a long way I can tell you!
Now it seems funny as I think about it, but even though we made the choice to go ahead and do this its been kind of unreal and I have been somewhat nonchalant about the whole thing. That is until I got the phone call from the estate agent telling me about our expected visitor and now, well I am just a bundle of nerves, because now it's all too real.
Oh don't worry I am not getting my hopes up that the 1st person through the door is going to buy the place, after all they are never going to want to pay the asking price and I am not going to want to sell for much less either.
It's not even the thought of the house being sold that's got the nerves tingling, it's that irrational fear of, what if...
Anyways, I'll have to get back to you on how it goes with our house hunter...
|
|
|
|
|
