Our New House

With our new baby life was good and we loved living in San Diego. While money was tight we got by and we always had what we needed. After our first year in our second rented house we decided to see if we could afford to buy a house. As it turned out the market was definitely a buyers market and if we didn’t get too greedy we figured we probably could buy one. In 1994 Lisa’s Granny passed away and left her a chunk of money that would go a long way toward a down payment. One day when we were out with our real estate agent looking at houses Lisa saw a house for sale that she really wanted to look at. I rolled my eyes and asked her why she wanted to look at houses that she knew we couldn’t afford to buy? She simply responded with, “What does it hurt to look? I want to see it.” In my head I’m saying, “because it will get your hopes up” but I learned long ago you can’t argue with her when she gets like that so off we went.

We both fell in love with the house. We had decided on some "must haves" for the house we were to buy. Two of them were, it must have a three car garage and it must be in a cul-de-sac. This house was on a fairly busy street and it only had a two car garage. It was, however, on a beautiful canyon and had a beautiful back yard that opened into the canyon. We decided since the kids were older we could do without the cul-de-sac and we would make do with a two car garage. Three car garages are California's answer to having no basement. All the junk that would normally go in a basement goes into the third car garage.

So as I'm sitting there falling in love with a house I can't afford Lisa wanders over to the kitchen counter and picks up some papers that are sitting there. "What does it mean to have an assumable mortgage?" she asked. As it turned out all the seller was asking was that we pay them enough so they could recoup some of the money they'd put into the house and we take over the payments. The beauty of that was that the mortgage was from the early 90's when the interest rates were the lowest they've been in decades. Lisa's inheritance was enough to make the seller happy and we were the proud owners of a new house. We made out nicely by purchasing a house at the bottom of the market and assuming a mortgage from when the interest rates were at the bottom. We ended up with a much nicer house than we could have otherwise afforded. What a wonderful deal. Thank you Granny.