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by Stephannie Tanner

Three houses still makes for a four lettered word but, that word is not “home” my friends.  Now, don’t get me wrong I am very thankful for what we have and I know that if we can stick with it for a few years they will serve us well.  But sometimes the going is real rough.  I’ll try and explain our house situation without completely confusing ya’ll.

House #1: I lived in this house until I was about 10 years old. My parents kept it as a rental and my husband and I bought it from them a couple of years after we were married.  For the first year that we owned the house we lived with my parents and pretty much gutted and totally renovated the entire house.  Two weeks after we moved in we had to evacuate because of Hurricane Rita.  Our entire area was completely devastated by the hurricane. Luckily the only damage to our house was the roof, and a tree had demolished a shed that was in the backyard. After living there for a while we decided to do a small addition to the house.  We did all the work ourselves and it took about 6 months.  Literally a week after we completely finished the addition we were driving to my parents and one of the houses on their street was having a for sale sign stuck in the ground.  My husband saw the crazy in my eyes and just said ” Oh no”.  By that evening we were under contract. It all happened so fast that we didn’t have time to sell our house.  We decided that we would keep it and turn it into a rental. That brings us to………

House #2: We currently live in this house.  I love the neighborhood that we are in.  Not only do my parents live down the street but so does my grandfather. Actually, when I was 16 the house my mom and dad had built burnt down a week before Christmas.  Months later it was decided that my parents would buy my grandparents’ home and my grandparents would live in another house on the property. So, I’d spent all of my young life running around the woods at my grandparents (it’s not a “traditional” neighborhood, there aren’t any lots less than an acre and most are 5 acres) and have known most of the people that live here since I was little.  I do not want to leave this neighborhood.  My girls are able to ride their bikes or walk down the road to see their grandparents and great grandfather whenever they want and I really like that. Much to my husbands chagrin another house has recently come up for sale down our street.  It’s bigger than ours and has a large shop on the property that my husband can utilize to make extra money.  He often buys vehicles, fixes them, and then sells them for a profit. His doing this is difficult right now because he doesn’t really have a good place for it. We are considering buying this house and turning the one we currently live in into our second rental property.  I have so many conflicting feelings about this but I’ll get into that in a different post.

House #3:  Unfortunately, we now have this house because my husbands grandmother passed away in January of this year and we inherited it.  My husband and his cousin are the only family she had left and she left the house to both of them.  This is a real problem.  My husbands cousin lives in Nevada.  When my husbands grandmother was sick we took care of her and starting paying her bills. We never could get the cousin to answer the phone when there were problems.  Now that she is gone, we really can’t get him to answer the phone.  We are paying utilities right now so that the house doesn’t fall into disrepair.  Ideally we would live there and really knock our debt out because there is no note but, it is over an hour away. It would cost so much in gas to get back and forth to our jobs that it wouldn’t really benefit us. Also, we would have to change our girls schools and the town the house is in is really tiny and the schools aren’t great. My husband is considering just having the cousin buy us out or selling it to an outside buyer.  This entire situation has been a real nightmare. We don’t want to have to get a lawyer in order to get in contact with him but we don’t see that we have much of a choice.

Current amounts owed:

• House #1.   $66,830.20
• House #2.  $82,362.50
• House #3.  $anity

Ok. So, there is the skinny on the houses. Any opinions about buying another house or how to deal with the cousin? I’d love to hear them!

Check back tomorrow for interest rates, minimum payments, and income info!