We were just 24 and 25 when we bought our condo. Young and naïve and filled with the same "the world is our oyster" optimism that most couples who are months away from their wedding feel. We thought we were getting ahead, we thought we were making a smart investment, but we had no way of knowing that the housing market would drop so quickly and drastically so soon after we bought.
Now we're faced with a suggested sale price that's $30,000 less than our purchase price on the high estimate and $60,000 less on the low estimate. And that's not factoring in the upgrades we've done, which, thank god, we've done with our own two hands.
Renting our condo to wait out this horrible housing market is not an option because not only is the condo sales market bad, but the condo rental market is even worse. We would still be paying over half of our mortgage with the monthly rental price we would be able to get.
Staying put is also not an option because as Jon put it, "We don't want to put our lives on hold." We want to start a family, oh how we want to start a family, and we just can't do that in our tiny place. Yes, I know people have done it before us and managed just fine, but it's not for us. And as much as Northern Virginia has to offer us in terms of jobs and location, location, location, we're over it. We're tired of having to wait until 8:00 PM to even think about getting on the Beltway and tired of fighting for parking spaces and tired of being far from our families.
This whole experience thus far has taught me some very valuable lessons. Namely, those two dirty words, short sale, is not necessarily a reflection on the seller in any way. We pay our mortgage and the rest of our bills on time every month. In fact, we carry no credit card debt and the only debt we do have is our mortgage, one car payment and student loans from Jon's MBA program. We are not the faces you picture when you hear the words short sale. But indeed, when you sell a home for less than what you owe on it, that puts you in the short sale category unless you can make up the difference.
Making up the difference is exactly what we intend to do. We refuse to taint our credit in any way by accepting a short sale. We've been dealt a very bad hand but we're going to do our best to come out of this with our credit and our sanity intact.
It might mean dipping into our savings account which we've dutifully been stocking money away into for years. It might mean taking a loan from our 401k. It might mean no anniversarymoon trip this year and it might mean cutting our budget even further. It might even mean moving in with my parents for a bit until we can get back to zero. But we're definitely not going down without a fight. Jon's been working his financial magic all day to think of more options and I've been on the phone setting up appointments with more realtors to get second opinions.
In the grand scheme of things, we really are lucky because we're gainfully employed, we can afford our mortgage and we have each other to lean on. Still, it's times like these that make me silently utter my favorite prayer over and over again in my head: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."
We will get through this.
