and where the hell have I been?
May. 2nd, 2015 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraque_bkI guess I'll start off with a RL update, since that's what's been occupying most of my brainspace lately.
The big time-and-energy-sink has been a real estate deal. My brother and I have had joint ownership of our mom's old house since she passed away in 2004. When I decided to move out of the area a few years ago, he wanted to keep the property but didn't have the money/credit to buy me out, so I let it go with his promise that he'd buy me out "someday".
With some people this might be a terrible plan, but I've never known my brother to do a deceitful or selfish thing in his life, so it made sense to me. And six years later, he delivered. He's buying me out. Isn't it nice when people can be counted on? It does happen sometimes!
Of course, I vastly underestimated the amount of work that would go into not only transferring ownership of a property (the tax forms alone are phenomenally complicated and I had to get an accountant to help), but doing so while on the opposite coast from all the other people involved. April turned into a month of endless phone and email tag with people who could never seem to remember that it was three hours later for me, nor understand that I don't live in a major urban area with title insurance companies on every corner. It also didn't help that the escrow officer kept making mistake after mistake on the grant deed paperwork (the worst was a decimal point error that stated my tax withholding as 1/10th of what it should have been... seriously) and one of the necessary bank people had a vacation scheduled right in the middle of everything.
But! I think as of this past week, I have finally gotten my end of the paperwork squared away, and now it's just waiting on all of it to get fedexed back to my brother so he can sign things as well, and that should be it? I think?
And then I get the money. The property is in the San Francisco area, which, for those who don't know, is the second most expensive place to live in the continental US. So, half of a house there ends up being worth more than an equivalent house where I live now. You see where I'm going with this?
We've lived in the same apartment here in Vermont for years, and although it's in a great location and we love our landlord, the neighbor noise can be really bad. So we've been looking for a house.![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hannelore is actually friends with a realtor, who has been super helpful so far. It's good to have someone reliable on the job.
Overall I am fairly happy with how I've handled all this. It hasn't been without a few emotional crises (both the kind of silly "I'm not enough of an adult to do this!" and the slightly more reasonable "Letting go of connections to the city and house I grew up in is hard") but I'm weathering them.
If you read all this, I commend your patience. I promise the rest of May's posts won't be about this, and will, I hope, be far more interesting!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.
The big time-and-energy-sink has been a real estate deal. My brother and I have had joint ownership of our mom's old house since she passed away in 2004. When I decided to move out of the area a few years ago, he wanted to keep the property but didn't have the money/credit to buy me out, so I let it go with his promise that he'd buy me out "someday".
With some people this might be a terrible plan, but I've never known my brother to do a deceitful or selfish thing in his life, so it made sense to me. And six years later, he delivered. He's buying me out. Isn't it nice when people can be counted on? It does happen sometimes!
Of course, I vastly underestimated the amount of work that would go into not only transferring ownership of a property (the tax forms alone are phenomenally complicated and I had to get an accountant to help), but doing so while on the opposite coast from all the other people involved. April turned into a month of endless phone and email tag with people who could never seem to remember that it was three hours later for me, nor understand that I don't live in a major urban area with title insurance companies on every corner. It also didn't help that the escrow officer kept making mistake after mistake on the grant deed paperwork (the worst was a decimal point error that stated my tax withholding as 1/10th of what it should have been... seriously) and one of the necessary bank people had a vacation scheduled right in the middle of everything.
But! I think as of this past week, I have finally gotten my end of the paperwork squared away, and now it's just waiting on all of it to get fedexed back to my brother so he can sign things as well, and that should be it? I think?
And then I get the money. The property is in the San Francisco area, which, for those who don't know, is the second most expensive place to live in the continental US. So, half of a house there ends up being worth more than an equivalent house where I live now. You see where I'm going with this?
We've lived in the same apartment here in Vermont for years, and although it's in a great location and we love our landlord, the neighbor noise can be really bad. So we've been looking for a house.
hannelore is actually friends with a realtor, who has been super helpful so far. It's good to have someone reliable on the job.Overall I am fairly happy with how I've handled all this. It hasn't been without a few emotional crises (both the kind of silly "I'm not enough of an adult to do this!" and the slightly more reasonable "Letting go of connections to the city and house I grew up in is hard") but I'm weathering them.
If you read all this, I commend your patience. I promise the rest of May's posts won't be about this, and will, I hope, be far more interesting!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.
