TLDR: Went from looking at 500K+ homes to small one story homes. Finally downsizing to smaller home, friends question the decision, we are excited to have less home. Mortgage lender required us to explain our decision in a letter. Feeling great about the garage sale today.
Well my husband and I have been looking for a new home since last October and we finally made an offer and are moving into a new home in a few weeks. Our new home is more that 1,100 sqft smaller, all one story and it has everything we need plus a little more.
When we started our search my husband and I were looking at half million dollar homes that were larger and almost brand new construction. We were sure that now that we were making more money we should be looking at a bigger, nicer new home. Luckily we didn't make offers and eventually ditched our realtor. (She wasn't helpful and put down the smaller homes I expressed interest in.)
We eventually realized we were being crazy consumers looking to up size for no reason, except that we could.
My husband's friends (with large homes, worth more than half a million) think we are crazy. One kept trying to talk us of out of our home, because the homes in our area are the cheapest (due to small size and lacking upgrades) in the city limits. However we are happy to live with less. We are also super happy to live right next to the golf course (husband's passion) and the walking trails for me.
The most annoying thing I've run into in turning the boat around was our loan provider. They made us write a letter explaining why we were purchasing our home. Their reason: We were moving into a home significantly smaller than our current home, so they needed to know why. I know they wouldn't have asked us to explain why were purchasing a home much larger than our current one.
Today was fantastic we had a garage sale day in our community and we finally let go of so much stuff. Things we were given and felt like we had to keep, things we kept as souvenirs, things that were "lost" in our closets or spare rooms. It felt great to give them away to people that were actually interested in those items and to get a bit of money in exchange. Plus the pain of selling things worth so much more than what we were able to get for them, is a good lesson for us.
Submitted April 22, 2017 at 02:59PM by Sookasook http://ift.tt/2oxm32f
