Here's the Scoop!

Last week, Todd and I finally made the call that we have been talking about making for a few months now. We called a real estate agent. Since, Todd lost his job in January, we have known that this step was on the horizon. We love our home, but we also love having food and electricity and clothes and.. well, you get the idea. We have had wonderful people get us through the last few months and so we were able to keep up with the bills, but we can't expect other families to sacrifice on our behalf forever. We can not realistically pay our mortgage between what little I bring home and what small amount unemployment gives. We have been actively talking about putting our house up for sale for the last few weeks and the more we talked, the more at peace we felt about it.

We met with a friend of ours, who also happens to be in real estate and talked things over with him. It seems that our house is now worth about 50% less than what we bought it for seven years ago. Yes FIFTY percent. Because we were one of those "lucky" homeowners who got sucked into an ARM loan, we had to refinance and that put our mortgage amount up as well. In order to sell our home, we will have to ask for a "short sale" which is basically when the bank agrees to take less than what you owe on your loan. This process can take three to eight months and since we still have to find a buyer, we decided that the best decision is to put the house on the market now.

Our biggest prayer is that by the time we are ready to move out, Todd will have another job and we can move into a new place at that time. If he doesn't, my in laws have opened their home to us and we will stay there for a little while. Either way, I am not concerned about where we will be. Amazingly, God has given us so much peace that even the idea of not seeing what is ahead doesn't bring fear. It can be frustrating because we can't make plans more than one month at a time, but I think its been a great place to be. If we only have tomorrow to look at, there is no worry for the long term. In the mean time, we hope that our home will find new owners who will love to live here just as much as we did. We are so thankful that we were blessed with this house.