Deciding on a house

 Back in February of this year I made the decision to relocate from Charlotte, NC to Madison Heights, Va.  Charlotte had been home for 3 years and as much as I like it, the cost of living in such a large city and all the amenities of this urban area in NC is exhausting my finances.  I retired in 2011 and along with my long time companion we had moved from the arctic temps of Alaska to the warmer temps of Charlotte.

Unfortunately Ken died of a heart attack in the fall of 2011 and left me alone in this new city with all the expenses having a home in Charlotte generates.  Together Charlotte was a comfortable environment.  Alone property taxes and maintaining a large house was proving a pricey location.

So I made the decision to move back to Va and closer to family and find a cheaper abode.  Hince the home search.  With the help of a realtor and my sister a possible house was found around the end of March.  The saga is just starting, much to my frustration.

 The house I found was a 1974 brick ranch that was foreclosed on.  It had been tied up with banks for the past 6 months or so, abandoned by the owners and reprocessed.  By the time I saw it and decided that this was my soon to be new retirement home, the price had been reduced to an incredible low price of $125,000.  Selling the house in Charlotte will fund
the new house, any remodel that is needed and the move to VA.

Let the fun again.

Step 1.  Make an offer on the house.  Easy thing right?  Wrong.  The offer has to go from my Realtor, to the realtor working for the bank and either be accepted or rejected.  That in itself is not a big issue.  It's a few pages of legal language, an earnest money check and waiting a couple days.

Step 2.  Find out your offer has been accepted.  Now there is the beginning of a timeline or countdown.  In this case it goes something like this:  if I want to finance the house with a mortgage, and because it is a foreclosure, the house is 'as is', I need to have a home inspection done.  I have 10 days to have an inspection done and tell the bank 'yes' or 'no' on the house based on the inspection.  If the inspection finds lots of problems I can walk away from the purchase and only be out the money I spend on the inspection.  Inspections are at my cost, regardless of what I decide on the house.

Step 3.  House inspection.  The day of the inspection
it is raining, has been raining; for several days.  This is an old house, on a crawlspace that's a couple feet tall. And there's a lot of things wrong, like gutters that are not in the downspouts, a missing vapor barrier, several inches of water under the house, the list goes on.

The results of the inspection makes me revise my offer to the bank, dropping it by $5K. The bank wasn't happy and we spent 2 days going back and forth, finally settling on $123K because I was tired of dickering over $2K.

Now it's time to find a mortgage company willing to write a loan.  Time for another lesson in mortgage language.