On Lemons and Lemonade
For the past year or so, Allyson and I have been in a mad rush toward home-ownership. We’ve been throwing every spare dime into our savings account, and then donning the proverbial sackcloth every time an unexpected expense came in. You see, we really, really hate our current apartment. People steal our plants. Our neighbors are loud, obnoxious, drunken assholes. I’m increasingly too lazy to actually take things up and down the stairs. Our collective focus, our total awareness, was squarely centered on escaping this apartment into a small piece of the world that we could truly call ours.
We were optimistic. We had some money saved up. I got a surprise raise recently. In short, things looked good. I played with some online calculators, checked my credit score, and determined that the banks would almost certainly loan us more money than I actually wanted them to. I ran some further numbers on housing insurance and local property taxes just to figure out the exact point at which we could no longer afford a given house in the MLS listings. We contacted friends about realtors, got some promising names, and generally got pretty damn excited about the future.
Then we called the bank.
On the day before we called, new regulations went into effect in Alachua County, requiring more of a down payment because our housing market is depressed. The fellow at the credit union was super helpful with all this. He gave Allyson some exact figures for what we would need in order to start our home-buying process. Unfortunately, the final number was, for us, an unattainable figure. Screeching halt. Emergency stop. Plans on hold until further notice.
So yeah, upsetting news. It was clearly time to renegotiate our deal with ourself since our Katie-bar-the-doors savings strategy wasn’t sustainable in the long-term. We had put off nearly all big purchases in order to maximize our liquid assets for closing costs, down payments, etc. We were shell-shocked from the sheer effort involved. After some time off to mourn the loss of the house we never actually had, we sat down with our spreadsheets and Quicken accounts to figure out where to go from here. Allyson needed some clothes for job interviews. I needed a new computer about six months ago. We had dental bills staring us in the face so hard it made our molars throb. We reworked our savings strategy to be a lot more reasonable, made a kick ass savings plan that has us ready to buy a house two years from now (unless we need to move to a different county to find a teaching job for Allyson), and even figured out how to buy me a new computer without killing us in the long-term. Responsible adulthood, here we come!
The truly awesome news that comes out of this is that I’m buying a new computer for the first time in four years. The ol’ Powerbook has been showing its age of late, choking on all the background services I have it performing. When my Powerbook was having trouble running a freaking NES emulator, I knew that the time for a replacement wasn’t too far down the road. All of this led to last night, when I placed my order for a brand new Eight-core dual-2.8 GHz Mac Pro. After shamelessly paying $44 for two-day shipping, my new baby should be here by Wednesday or Thursday — just in time for Allyson’s trip out of town this weekend. That should leave me with plenty of time to get settled into my new digital digs without feeling like a bad husband for systematically ignoring my wife in favor of machinery.
Now all we need is the new version of Photoshop for this baby…