Posted by Jonathan Wise on Jun 08, 2008
I have the privilege of being the best man in two weddings this summer. Having never been a best man, I’m not exactly sure what this job entails, but I understand it involves some sort of speech.
Weddings are such a tremendous amount of work for the families involved — they’re invariably stress-inducing, and argument-inciting. As wonderful as our wedding day was, I do remember the huge amount of work that went into it.
To be honest, though, I’ve been ignoring my best-manly duties up until this point. The whole “moving to another country and buying a house” thing pressed more urgently on me. There are still a few problems in that area left to solve, our current home base has this oppressive feeling of temporary-ness in its mostly empty cupboards and very lived-out-of suitcases, and we have something of a vehicle crisis looming, but now that we’re back from our final wrap-up trip to New York, the upcoming weddings are being given some priority.
On top of the two weddings I’m in, Nic is also in one of her own, and there are two others we’ve been invited to. Each has significance for us in a different way, and we actually enjoyed doing some wedding gift shopping while we were in the States this past week.
Still, the idea of coming up with a speech of such great import to its subject (and his family and bride) is a little bit nerve-wracking. Especially given how well I know these guys! Anyone got any tips on how to write a good speech?
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Jun 02, 2008
There are those who thought this took too long. Still others thought this went way too fast. Let me offer some insight into our priorities and processes.
First, for the “too long” camp: I know there are plenty of folks in our socio-economic circle who’ve long since bought their first (or even second and third house) by our age. I would wager a guess that while a small percentage of those people may be better with money, or more disciplined with their finances than we have been, the vast majority of the people our age who have already bought a house are simply people with different priorities than us. We’ve known since before we were married that we’d be moving to the States at some point, so, until that happened, we endeavored to keep ourselves relatively agile — meaning free of large financial obligations or long-term housing commitments. We did this purposefully and intentionally, so that when God gave us the opportunity to pursue our over-the-border dreams and ambitions, we’d be able to move on that quickly.
We also knew that the move to the States wouldn’t be permanent. We’d anticipated a slightly longer stay, but God’s timing is better than ours, so we won’t question it. Nonetheless, with the real estate market the way it was (clearly in a bubble when we arrived, and clearly with the bubble bursting as we left) it never made good financial sense to buy a house in the States.
No, we haven’t been complete financial geniuses. Recently we started car shopping again, and realised that we’re not even considering cars in the neighborhood of what we paid for our last little car. We’ve learned a lesson or two there. But despite the bumps along the way, we’ve generally made pretty sound financial decisions, and are confident that in buying a house now, we’ve made the best of the opportunity and freedoms available to us while we were younger, and that we’re making the right decision now for the future of our family.
How many people who buy their first house when they’re 21 get to go work in New York for two years, or spend a month in Asia? Furthermore, our decision to delay the purchase of a house has allowed us to bless other people generously, and the joy that comes from that is pretty hard to place a dollar value on.
Now for those in the “too quickly” camp, we understand that it may seem like this happened very fast. In fact, this has been a very long process for us.
We have, at a number of points over the past 4 years, observed the housing market in whatever place we’ve been living in, and only when we knew that we’d be moving back to Ontario, did we begin to see a positive place to invest.
Over the past 6 months, we’ve been investigating the finer details of the purchase: mortgage rates, market behaviour, currency stability.
And over the past 2 months, we’ve looked at, on average, 4 properties a day, via the various technology tools available to us. In Canada, mls.ca contains complete listings for every house sold by a real-estate agent anywhere. Propertyguys.ca (and .com in the States) lists a large number of privately sold houses. All the details of these houses are listed online (usually including pictures), and firing up Google Earth allows you to view the neighbourhood, surrounding facilities and resources, and get an idea about what the property looks like.
And over the past 2 weeks, we’ve driven through all the neighbourhoods we were interested in, to get a better feel for where we wanted to live.
Granted, we actually went and saw only about 12 houses in person, but that’s because by the time we actually were ready to view a house, we knew exactly what we were looking for, exactly what problems to keep an eye out for, and exactly what kind of place would meet our needs.
The only difficult part has been beating the other informed and ready buyers to the punch. More than a couple times a place we’ve been interested in, but didn’t move on quickly, has been sold the next day.
Obviously this is a huge purchase — the biggest one we’ve ever made. And I don’t think anyone is more nervous than I am about assuming the giant debt load, obligation and restriction on freedom that comes with a mortgage. But one thing I am completely confident in is that we’ve bought a house that will fit our needs, and that we can handle the payments on without feeling tight or financially constrained at all. We got what we needed, in a great location, for a price that is well within our comfort zone.
And thanks to my parents, we got it a year earlier than we’d hoped for. So yes, we know what we’re doing, and to the best anyone can predict, we stand to make decent money on this place.
We’re looking forward to having everyone over for a house warming party in early September. We’ll make sure we’ve got the hot tub warmed up for ya!
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Jun 01, 2008
I find it a little strange that people congratulate you on assuming $215,000 worth of debt, but I guess in our society, that’s something to be happy about.
We bought a house.
I can’t say I’m not happy… I mean it is our first place, and it very neatly fit the bill of what we were looking for. Frankly, its a gorgeous first house.
It has the required 3 bedrooms, on the top floor. The main floor has a somewhat open kitchen/dining area, with a window into the living room. Out the patio door in the kitchen is a decent deck and, get this, a hot tub!
The basement is finished, albeit a little eccentrically as a den/rec room. We’ll eventually be putting in a wall to separate out an office area, but otherwise its ready to use — a far cry from most of the houses we looked at.
The walls are painted pretty neutral colors, so we won’t need to re-decorate before we move in. The deck will need to be refinished sometime in the next couple years, and the roof is in rough shape. A quoted $3000 will fix that, but we’re hoping it’ll hold us through the winter so we can deal with that next year.
Aside from those caveats, the house is perfect. Its small, but its cute, and in a nice neighbourhood in a little village 19 minutes away from our church. We made our initial offer this afternoon, then drove out to the house, and parked outside while our respective real estate agents negotiated on our behalf. Originally the hot tub was excluded, but their asking price for everything else was quite competitive for the neighbhourhood. We talked them down about $3000, and into including the hot tub. The deal was done by 3:30.
Unfortunately, their initially stated move-out date had to be pushed back from when we first viewed the place, so we are stuck in our student-residence-limbo right until the end of the summer — August 22nd will be the day we take possession. In some ways this sucks, because sleeping every night on a mattress on a floor isn’t exactly wonderful. In other ways it frees up the whole summer to deal with the rest of our relocation issues, with the house problem already solved.
The offer was, of course, conditional on financing, inspection and insurance, so we’ll take a run at those things early this week, with hopes of having all of that finalized before Wednesday, when we have to head back to New York for a couple days.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in touch with our co-investor on the ground, but we’re pretty confident that they’ll be happy with the place. It really is a pretty great little house…
And we really are about to be in debt by over $200 large, so I think I’m gonna go puke now.
