Z/Web

Oh my, the challenge of this move thing really hit home today as I began packing up my books. I packed a dozen boxes and lugged them to the storage locker. When I got I repeated the process, then sat back, tired, and realized with great depression that I hadn’t made a dent. Of the seven 68” bookcases in my living room I had only started on three of them and they still looked completely full! I have too many books. I have no idea how many I have, though I guesstimated once and came up with around 3,000. It could be more or less, though. Normally that’s a good thing, but when I have to lift them all, it’s a bit depressing. It’s frustrating that I’ve done all this work and you can’t even tell. It makes the mountain remaining seem even more daunting. Worse, it’s been raining lately and sprinkled a bit today — I moved boxes anyway — but that makes me worry that I could lose days in the future if the weather doesn’t co-operate. With so much to do in such a short time, I could run short if I don’t get moving. I hate leaving such a mountain of stuff to the last minute.

I woke up today trying not to think and worry about the inspection happening; instead I focused on packing. It worked, for when the phone call came I almost wasn’t expecting it. Good news: the house passed inspection. Sure, there are problems, but all minor, mostly preventative maintenance stuff. Most of it isn’t even of immediate concern, but things I’ll work on next spring (i.e. painting, etc.). So now there’s no reason for this not to go through, as long as all the paperwork gets completed and the sale of my place here goes smoothly. The timing is still tight: I’d ideally like to have things happen earlier and close around the first instead of the fifth, just to have everything well and done and make scheduling the move easier.

I bought a hand truck. Rather than rent one from U-Haul during the move, I just bought one for $40. It’s a useful thing and it will help me while I move stuff to the storage locker. This one’s convertible from upright to a flatbed which is excellent.

Started packing today, filling up my new storage unit with stuff. I also went ahead and opened a bank account in Oregon. Had a trouble doing it over the web and had to do it over the phone instead. The lame site wouldn’t accept my credit card because it said my name wasn’t my name! Worse, the site was basically locked at that step and wouldn’t let me go forward or backward, so I was completely stuck. But at least that’s one more task done.

I just got a call from the bank: my loan has been approved! So now we just need to dot a few more i’s and check off a few more to-do items, then this will actually happen. Wow, I’m almost starting to believe it!

I spoke with the people purchasing my place and explained my concerns over the unsecured installment payment. They seemed to think it wasn’t a big deal either way, they’re a $100 million company and they pay their debts, etc. We didn’t exactly come up with a new contract, but at least it seemed like securing the loan was a possibility. If they’d balked at that it would have seemed fishy to me. I still haven’t decided if it’s really necessary; if it’s easy to do I’d prefer it secured, but if it jeopardizes the purchase or creates massive paperwork headaches I don’t want to go that route. That’s probably not intelligent of me but I’m a trusting person.

In other news, we’ve got our inspection of the new house scheduled for Friday. I don’t like doing it this late in the process — if we find a major problem now I’ll lose money and effort I’ve spent in this process so far, but of course I do need to know if there are any issues with the home. Despite my nerves, I’m moving ahead. I’ve started telling clients about the move, and today I rented a storage locker and will begin packing tomorrow.

I called a place in McMinnville that offers Wi-Band — wireless broadband Internet — but unfortunately it won’t work in Lafayette. They might eventually get it there, but I’m not crazy about the whopping $300 install fee (cost per month is $50, about the same as everything else). So I called up Comcast cable and it seems I can get setup with broadband pretty easy from them, so that’s what I’ll do. The one feature of Wi-Band that I really liked is that it’s synchronous, meaning that upload and download speeds are the same. DSL and cablemodem are asynchronous, so uploads a tenth of the speed of the download. For my business, that’s a disadvantage, though not that big a deal. As long as I can have fast, reliable Internet service, that’s the most important thing.

Of course everything in this house-buying process is nerve-wracking and terrifying. There are so many possible mistakes to make. It’s a huge commitment, the financial burdens are immense, and it seems like every day there’s a twist that could ruin all the careful planning. One of these occurred to me over the weekend when I suddenly realized that I might have made a mistake. You see, when I negotiated the sale of my place here, the company buying it told me that due to cash flow issues they couldn’t come up with the full price in 30 days. At first I thought the deal was over and I wouldn’t be able to buy the house in Oregon. Then I realized that as long as I had enough cash in 30 days to cover the down payment and moving expenses, we could still make the deal work. So we agreed on a split payment deal where the buyer pays me some money in 30 days and the balance in 90. That sounded good to me until someone pointed out that there ought to be an interest penalty or something if they didn’t pay me that second installment on time. That’s when I realized that there’d be little to stop the company from delaying that payment or even paying it at all: it’d cost a fortune for me to take them to court to force payment and by that time I’d already be moved to Oregon in my new place and I’d have relinguished all rights to my current place. This made me nervous, so nervous that I actually visited a lawyer to get some advice. He agreed with my thinking: I basically am extending the company an unsecured loan. He advised I talk to them about securing the loan, perhaps attaching it to the property in some way so that they couldn’t sell it without paying me off first. So that’s the plan there.

I’d originally planned to open a storage locker today and start packing, but it was pouring rain so I scrapped that idea.

Some crazy stuff happened today. At least it seemed crazy at the time, though in retrospect it wasn’t as bad as I thought live. The main things I knew waking up was that I had a major deadline with my magazine — I had to get the cover art FedExed to the printers today — and I we’d scheduled a mortgage meeting in the afternoon. The former I’d worked on over the weekend, so it was no problem, but I was a little nervous and unsure of what to expect about the latter meeting.

In the morning I ran into a fascinating chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. I asked my local bank branch about opening a checking account in Oregon since that’s one of the things on my to-do list. To my surprise, they cannot open an account there for me here: I have to do that up there. That creates a problem because I need to put the money from the sale of my place here into that account… at least that would be much easier than moving money around later. I really wanted to have that account all set up with a check card so I could use it on my trip to Oregon to prep the new house for move-in. It’s also supposed to be a free account with my mortgage and I’d get payments automatically debited. But if the bank here can’t create that account, that makes things awkward. There’s a chance I can open the account online or over the phone; I’ll have to explore those two options.

The afternoon meeting proved anti-climactic. We just filled out a lot of forms for the new loan (remember, we switched loan programs last week). There was a bit of a scare earlier when I showed up at the Scotts Valley bank to meet the mortgage lady for our trip to San Jose for the meeting and she wasn’t there: I suddenly panicked and thought maybe I’d misunderstood and we were to meet at the Santa Cruz branch. I didn’t know her cell number and she didn’t know mine so I was unsure how we were going to connect. Fortunately, she was just a few minutes late and showed up and we made it to the meeting successfully. The loan process at the meeting was fairly routine, a few basic forms (I mostly signed my name) and a few questions. This is a loan only for first-time home buyers, but since I technically don’t own real estate (I pay rent for the land on my current place), I qualify. The loan guy said the bank would have all my material before we even got back to Santa Cruz, so things are moving.

I spent the morning trying to get homeowners insurance. Now this is where I get annoyed at the world. From articles I read my new home is considered a modular or pre-fabricated home. It is not a mobile (manufactured) home which sit on a permanent metal sheath and have wheels for transport. My new home was simply built in a factory (actually better than a site-built since it’s not sitting in the elements during construction) and transported to the site on flat-bed trucks and assembled there on a real concrete foundation. To me this is a real house: it has real 2x6 construction, real walls with drywall, etc. Unless you’re a contractor, you’d never know by looking that it’s manufactured. My current place is definitely a trailer: it’s above ground on wheels, has a hitch in front, and the walls are paper thin (literally only 3” thick). Yet for reasons of stupidity or politics, the two homes are both considered “manufactured” and exactly the same for purposes of mortgage loans and homeowners insurance! It is really annoying. Many homeowners policies don’t cover manufactured homes and most insurance companies charge a premium for them, as I discovered today. I finally found one that wasn’t charging me two to three times the typical rate (it’s still about 40% higher), but it took some research. What’s annoying is they are grouping me in with trailers and mobile homes when this place is definitely unlike those. My insurance is higher because I’m grouped in with trailers that blow over in wind storms! That’s really stupid but unless I want to start my own lobbyist group and fight huge corporations, there’s not a lot I can do to change those technicalities.

Got some encouraging news from the bank. We’re moving forward with the new loan, so that’s good. It’s still too early to tell if there are some obstacles ahead but we’ll know soon. Even better news came from the bank’s appraisal department. Because the appraiser is going to Hawaii next week for vacation, he got out to the house yesterday and turned in his report today — wicked fast! Normally it can take two or three weeks, apparently. Best of all, he appraised the house at more than what I’m paying! That’s really good news on many levels: it means it’s a good house, I’m getting a great deal, and it helps my LTV ratio. (That’s loan-to-value, a bank term expressing the ratio of my loan to the value of the property. Since my value just went up, that means my loan is for a smaller percentage of the value, so in a sense it’s like I’m borrowing less. You see, I’m learning a lot about these things!) Anyway, I feel much less depressed today. Depending on what happens with the loan meeting on Monday, I think I’ll start packing on Tuesday. My plan is to box up 85% of my belongings and put them in a storage unit. The only stuff I’ll keep out will be stuff I’m using on a daily basis (TV, computer, bed, furniture, some kitchen stuff) and things I plan to sell at a moving sale. That way when it comes time to bring the moving truck, I’ll be 85% packed. But for that to happen I’ve got to get started. I’ve got a small car, which means I can only move a few boxes at a time, and a lot of small stuff (tons of books) which takes a while to pack. I’d also like to sort through stuff and throw stuff away if I can. Usually when I move I run out of time and have to just throw everything in boxes for sorting later. I’ve still got boxes I haven’t unpacked from my last move eight years ago!

Now it sounds like there may be some issues with the loan (someone is “worried” about something, all very vague, could be something, could be nothing), and my uncle (my Realtor) is concerned because we still haven’t gotten signatures from the bank selling the property, only their fax that said they accepted the contract. In other words, I don’t officially have a contract yet. It’s most likely just bureaucracy and bank carelessness, but it’s frustrating because we can’t move ahead with the inspection and other details until we’ve got signatures.

More bad news. Apparently the bank’s just uncovered a technicality that means I can’t qualify for the loan I’d been trying to get, which means we must now switch trains and find an entirely new loan. I’m really depressed now because all my financial calculations were based on the current loan’s rates and payments, and a new loan means going through all that again. The previous loan had low initial interest-only payments for five years and then went to an annual adjustable, which suited my plans perfectly. Now we’re looking at a 30-year fixed which has the same payments always, but means my initial payments will be much higher. Either is doable but being self-employed I really preferred the lower rates as my income can fluctuate. This turns all my calculations and plans on their head. I’m really depressed and wondering if this is worth the hassle. I hate involving emotions because than my decision-making is suspect, but I can’t help but be emotionally involved. I feel there’s this huge mile-long “To Do” list on my head in order to move my life to Oregon, yet I can’t get started on it. According to our original schedule I’d be in Oregon exactly 30 days from now — not a lot of time to pack up my life, especially considering I need to continue working in the meantime.

I just found out this new loan is a special first-time buyer loan and thus the interest rate is much lower than I expected (lower than regular 30-year fixed loans). That’s better. My monthly payments will still be higher than before, but not as bad as I was thinking, and that negative’s offset by the fact that I’d have a really low rate fixed for the next 30 years. Unfortunately there’s still a question or two about this new loan: we’re not sure if self-employeds qualify and there might be another complication or two. I guess we won’t know for a day or so.

I was up late last night and up early this morning working on mortgage stuff. Made some progress. Due to an odd set of circumstances (it was owner financed but payment was made via a bank) I never received a title on my current place and now the old owner can’t be found, but I did manage to get a report from the bank that shows I paid off the balance, so hopefully that’s proof enough that I own my place. I vaguely knew about that situation but of course I wasn’t planning on moving until next summer so I thought I’d have time to figure it out by then. Now I’m forced to do everything in a rush, which actually isn’t that bad of a thing because otherwise I’d probably put it off forever. Anyway, I’m well on my way to getting the rest of the list of documentation taken care of. A few of the things are items the bank and others must do (such as an appraisal of the property), so no worries there. Speaking of the appraisal, the mortgage lady had hoped that they might not need a walk-through appraisal (which takes longer) but word today is that they will. It’s been scheduled for tomorrow, though, which is quick. We haven’t even done our own inspection yet! I think that inspection will happen later this week; since this property further south than my Realtor’s normal inspector goes, Phil is trying to find a good local person.

The inspection makes me a little nervous. It’s not that I expect anything to be wrong, but simply because I’ve already invested so much into this purchase and if anything goes wrong now, I’m in a quandary. Since it’s a bank sale at the other end they have said they won’t fix anything and I suspect that means they won’t drop the price unless it was something so huge as to significantly effect the appraisal value. So say we discover an issue with the plumbing, something in the neighborhood of a few grand to fix. Do I eat that and go ahead or lose the inspection and other fees and tremendous amount of time invested in the purchase so far? Of course I’d be tempted to say I’ll take the house no matter what the condition simply because I’m now emotionally committed, but rationally that’s not always a good decision. Hopefully the inspection and appraisal go smoothly (the house is only ten years old, after all) and this will be all moot. But meantime, I can’t help but look at all the possibilities. Time is running out and I really need to start packing if I’m going to complete this move in the time allotted, but I don’t want to jinx things by starting too early. The waiting and unknown is driving me crazy. At this point I am starting to think I’m moving, but stuff could still derail the process. It’s frustrating. But I mustn’t let myself get down. We’ve made a ton of progress (it’s been less than two weeks since I first saw the house) and actually we’re going faster than scheduled. But the unknowns are making it difficult for me to concentrate on regular work. I feel like I can’t plan ahead. I have to make two schedules, one if I move and an alternate in case something falls through.

Today sounded simple enough: the contract was to arrive from Oregon by noon and I’d take it to the bank and meet the mortgage lady who’d make copies for me and her and then I’d overnight back to Oregon. But of course nothing can be simple, right? It started with phone calls: it was time to officially pick the mortgage I wanted and that involved some last minute calculating to decide if a lower interest rate with higher fees was better or vice versa. Fortunately rates dropped this morning so I got locked in at a great rate. There were more calls: reminders, questions, and slight changes in plans. Then mid-morning, as I waited for FedEx, my electricity went off. After ten minutes, I found a neighbor who had electricity and realized it was just my place. I played around the breakers and got it back on (they didn’t seem to be tripped but turning them off and then back on worked). I’ve no idea what made it shut off — I wasn’t doing anything unusual and I hadn’t just turned anything on. The electric outage caused complications, however, because my cordless phones were dead and the Internet went offline for some reason. Then I couldn’t print. My printer would print half the page and just stop. Here I was five minutes from meeting the mortgage lady at the bank and my printer’s refusing to cooperate! I tried three times, then switched to a different printer, finally getting some output to take to the bank. Crazy stuff.

After a long day, more news. The mortgage sent me a list of 14 items of documentation I need to get her: mostly routine stuff like a copy of my driver’s license, P&L statement from my business, tax returns, bank statements, etc. That’s going to be fun. I hate paperwork. Sigh. I’m glad one only buys a few houses in life.

Wasn’t expecting any house news today as it’s a holiday, but lo and behold I get a call that the bank selling the house has accepted! So now we can begin the buying process for real. I spent some time last weekend reading about mortgages online, so at least now I’ve got so I understand the basic concepts, advantages and disadvantages of different types of loans. Going with an adjustable is a bit of a risk considering the low interest rates now, but the monthly payments are so it seems like the way to go. I was on the phone for over an hour with my mortgage rep going over options and giving her more information. Tomorrow we should be ready to file once I get the contract from Oregon.

The Waiting Game. Late today I got word from my Realtor uncle that the bank selling the house notified him that the bank officer in charge of looking at our offer was not in today, so there’s no progress to report. With Monday being a holiday, it’ll probably be Tuesday before anything happens.

Meantime, I used the delay to figure out my finances better. Being self-employed, I often pay myself by paying a personal expense from the business account. But I don’t track that well or officially break it out as salary, which is not a good habit. It turns out I pay myself more than I thought. That’s awesome for the mortgage loan, which is a relief. Hopefully that process will go smoothly. There are so many potential hang-ups in this house-buying thing that I can feel my stomach eating itself out of nerves. I can’t move forward until I know something more definitive, can’t stay the same because there’s a lot to do if I’m moving so soon. Frustrating.

More twists in the tale. My uncle called and said he’d finally gotten a hold of the other Realtor who had no explanation for our rejection. But even stranger, the bank had now suddenly lowered the list price on the house! We’ve decided to make a full price offer and are sending that in this morning. The funny part about that is the new lower price was less than the offer I had planned to make! Here’s hoping everything goes well and we get an acceptance this time. Now that we’ve got a sale on my place here, there really is no reason why they shouldn’t accept, unless they get a better offer. But why would they lower the price if other offers were coming in? It’s very strange, but as long as I can get the house, I won’t care.

After the high of yesterday’s “sale,” today ended on a strange note. I got a call from my uncle who was puzzled as can be: our offer had been rejected! The weird thing was that there was no counter-offer and no explanation. Of course we were dealing with a bank and they don’t always do things the normal way. My uncle couldn’t get a hold of the Realtor selling the place so we had no information. We assume this rejection means our offer was too low, but who knows. We’ve decided to make a higher offer in the morning.

Day dawns with faxes, pages of them. I sign and initial in dozens of places, and fax back the stack of papers. It’s our offer on the house. My uncle submits it immediately. The seller is a bank so he’s worried it could take time to get a response. I’m nervous all day. This is exciting, terrifying, and I can hardly eat.

I stop by BofA with my $200 check for the loan app. I visit a local storage facility to make sure they have storage units available and confirm prices. My plan is to rent one and begin packing and moving my zillions of books and junk as soon as I can so that the move itself will be half done by the time it’s time to rent the U-Haul.

This afternoon I called the people who offered to buy my place. This was another nerve-wracking experience. Would the offer still be available? I had a letter from them, but that was from August. When the rep came over at five, I explained to him what was going on. I didn’t mention we’d already made an offer in Oregon, but implied I was interested and wanted to see if the sale offer was still open. I explained I was working with BofA on the mortgage loan. Because my income is modest and I’m self-employed, I needed a hefty down payment on the new place to get the loan. I also was going to have substantial moving expenses (including needing to purchase a fridge and washer and dryer for the new place) for which I would need cash. So I countered their offer by raising it by $10K. Timing was another crucial aspect of this, because I needed the cash in 30 days to complete escrow. That’s when things began to go south and I felt my dream come crashing around me. The rep explained that he was in the middle of four similar transactions right now and didn’t “need” mine; his plate was full. There was no way he could come up with all that cash in thirty days. Maybe 90 days, but not thirty. For a moment I thought all was lost. But I hinted that maybe I didn’t need all the money at once and the guy began sketching out ideas, playing with numbers. It looked like we could maybe figure out a multi-part payment plan that could work. The only remaining question was the final amount. Now the park I’m in has rent control, but the rep explained that since they, as a company, were not considered a tenant, rent control doesn’t apply to them. So my landlord charges them a whopping two grand a month “storage.” We agreed to deduct that amount, minus the rent they would normally pay anyway, from the purchase price I’d asked for. So the bottom line is I almost got my asking price! Then another twist: the guy whipped out a contract, filled it out, and had me sign right then. I had thought this was just a preliminary meeting, but suddenly I’d sold my house! (I did make him include verbiage that the sale was contingent upon me getting the property in Oregon.) He gave me a check for $1,000, so-called “earnest money” in real estate parlance.

I spent a lot of time online today checking out the McMinnville area, making sure I can get broadband Internet, checking prices on moving trucks, doing mortgage loan calculations, trying to figure out a budget for the move, the timing of things, and monthly mortage payments. I found a huge number of fantastic moving sites on the Web: neat city comparison tools (shows you the differences between two places with everything from the cost of living to the weather), loan calculators, moving checklists, moving tips, articles on how to have a garage sale, and more. Very cool stuff. My head is about to explode.

My emotions are in a turmoil. Am I really doing this? Leaving my home of 17 years and moving? The whole twelve-hour drive home I pondered questions, analyzed and weighed the pros and cons. The only real negatives of moving were the hassles and expense, moving away from friends and community, losing a few design and consulting clients, and leaving my beloved San Jose Earthquakes soccer team. Countering that was a house that would cost half a million in the Bay Area. I’d have to stay in my trailer another ten years just to save up the down payment on a place like that. It really is a no-brainer. If I can get the timing to work, it’s something I want to do.