Moving On...Again?

Wow, it's been a while. (Seems like I start every post that way now!)

If we're friends on Facebook, you might have seen that a couple weeks ago I alluded to big news, so here it is:

We're selling the house again. Hopefully. Again.

As you may recall, things didn't go so well last time. Perhaps I really should have taken the freak-summer-in-Southern-California-thunderstorm-while-signing-listing-documents as an omen. We kept lowering the price, but eventually it got to the point that we weren't going to be able to sell it for what we wanted.

So, what has changed? Can we sell it for what we want now? Hahahahahahaha! No! But we have determined that if we sell now, we might be able to avoid a short sale.

See, our most recent plan was for Steve to retire around this time next year, at which point we would rent this place out and move somewhere else, likely Illinois. Then I was talking with a friend of mine who is very up on the real estate market and other financial stuff, and he said that unless we were making money on the house, it wouldn't be worth it. I said that we would probably lose money, but we would have additional tax write-offs and whatnot. He said it would take so long to get back to the point we want (basically, what we paid for it), that we would be crazy to hold onto it. He said we'd be hemorrhaging money to save what's already lost. That's when I had my a-ha moment and realized he was right.

The market also isn't showing signs of recovering at all here, so, as I said, selling now means we might avoid a short sale. Waiting a year almost guarantees we won't.

The house has been on the market for a week now, and we have had a lot of traffic and positive comments. If we sell for the asking price, we will just about exactly break even after commission. Our down payment and all we've put into the house will be gone, but at least we won't continue to lose money on it.

If we don't get our asking price, then we're looking at a short sale that could drag out for months.

Our next step is still up in the air, and depends a lot on how soon the house sells. We might rent a place around here until Steve is ready to retire, or Steve might become ready to retire sooner than he planned. In any case, we will likely be gone from Southern California by or around this time next year. It likely will not involve full-time RVing, but might involve some significant part-timing, depending on how things go. Of course, things rarely go as we plan, so who knows.

In other news, we took Oliver out for his first camping trip in the Jupiter Too last weekend. I'm going to work on a write-up of that in the next couple days.