Here is the back story. My wife and I live on a half acre in a house that could be called a fixer upper, but honestly we would have to tear it down and rebuild just to make it big enough for our family.
There are lots of bad memories here for my wife. We need a place of our own and I need more room.
I owned my own business prior to the April 27th 2011 tornadoes. Funny thing about insurance, you don't realize you don't have enough until it is too late. Most of the bills were paid off, but not all. Bills and no income mean credit problems.
I am thankful for what we have, but we really need a little more. I had always drempt of 10 to 20 acres. But my loving wife pointed out that we could not truly work that much land. Any more land than 5 acres would either be wooded or pasture. Nothing wrong with that, but that would not be full utilization. I love you honey.
We have tried all of the normal ways to obtain a better place with no success. We have been turned down for every loan. We were about to give up when we found a house that might be owner finance. My wife fell in love with the place. It had enough land but the land was grown up in privet and honey suckle. We walked around it, prayed about it, and talked to the realtor.
The people who owned the house had plenty of money and did not want to owner finance. During this time a family member who knew what was going on offered us a sizable loan (you know who you are and thank you from the bottom of my heart).
Well, no go on this house. A little bummed. We thought this was our last option. That night I did a search on the Internet for properties and one showed up that with the family loan we could pay cash for, hoorhaaa. We talked to the agent and walked the house. We are ready to buy. Guess what? This house is owned by Fannie Mae a governmental corporation.
I did a little research and decided to make an offer. We made an appointment with the agent to make an offer. Our nerves were out of control. We did find out that someone had already made an offer. We honestly thought we were out of luck. We decided we would make an offer anyway.
The night before we made the offer I drempt I was fighting a dragon made of paperwork. I had no idea how right that dream was. We had to fill out 20 pages of paperwork just to make an offer. As soon as we submitted Fannie Mae sent back that multiple offers had been received. We had to make our best offer, which we did. We made this offer on Thursday. Fannie May said they would close the property for offers at 11:39 am on Friday.
The offers are now closed and we have to wait to see if we are the ones who get the place. All of us want this to be our new homestead. If you are a praying person we would appreciate your prayers. If you are not a praying person we would appreciate you positive energy. In this way you can help us to...
Best of luck.
ReplyDeleteGood luck. Around here, homesteaders have to cut down trees, remove boulders or deliberately cover rock outcrops with topsoil hauled in, so count your blessings. Any soil left is often contaminated with arsenic and mercury from the mines, and so building up a farm is a lot of work. Then there's water. Its very hard to get things profitable, but people do it anyway because they want to live off the grid and without govt intervention. I can respect that.
ReplyDeleteSomething I've read about that has potential, someday, is an electric tractor. When solar gets cheaper, you can run it for less than diesel and electric has more torque. This means you can run more acres. Right now that's an extreme home-built kinda thing, but they're catching on in really rural farms. Do a Youtube search for electric tractor for an example or ten.
If you have to swap the water heater, make sure you get one with an immersion heater DC electric element so you can use excess solar power to preheat your water. And if you have to rebuild the floors or replace the furnace, give serious thought to radiators and boiler setup, with a very insulated Hot Water Sump, also with an immersion heater coil so you can use PV solar and solar concentrators to preheat the water to heat your house. Its a big savings, since water heating is your major energy cost in a home. PV tends to get HOT, so running a water/oil panel behind it keeps the PV cooler and more efficient (protecting from heat degradation of the panel) as well as providing a secondary source. This is an up and coming thing but eventually everyone will have this on their house. Leaves the natural gas for vehicle fuel and more grid power for business, especially since the Grid is iffy. Its currently nobody's legal responsibility to maintain, so its falling apart. We can thank Erin Brokovich for that. It really is an unintended consequence of her righteous fight against pollution and cancer. Pity the result was utilities got the legal right to abandon America as a consequence, kinda like Obamacare tripled everyone's health insurance rates. Thanks Mr. President! Sigh. Only sorrows multiply these days.
I hope you get this property. If not, at least you know what you're in for with the Fannie Mae forms, so can fill them out in advance for the next one. Maybe something better will come along.
Thanks guys for the encouragement. Someone made a better offer. Ours was rejected.
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