Paul recently told me what his salary will be at his new job that he started last week so I have been able to start doing more work with the budget. My calculations lead me to believe we can afford to stay here about 18 more months because of what we have in our savings account at the moment plus what we will add to that over the next 3 months while Paul is earning FT income from both Bucknell and KCI. Lately I had been wrestling between two "evils" - living in the house we looked at a couple of weeks ago (which had some serious drawbacks) OR me having a job I didn't really enjoy (such as proofreading dissertations) just to make some money. Every job I've had from middle school through the age of 40 I enjoyed - babysitting, working at a department store, teaching, being a principal, and being a professor. It was hard to think of possibly having a job JUST to make money whether I enjoyed it or not, especially when any of the jobs we thought of would involve a big pay decrease from what I was making previously. In the end I decided that being required to make some money would be better than living in that house. The job I would most like to have is teaching as an adjunct (either on-line or face to face). I'd love to supervise student teachers again, for example. Probably teaching 2 classes a year would be enough to make up the financial gap. Right now that's not a possibility, but I have about 11 months to have a firm plan in place for making some money (possibly could do tutoring or something like that which would be far more enjoyable than proofreading).
If I can't find a way to make some money, then next April we'll put our house back on the market, but if I do find a way to cover the gap between Paul's income and our expenses, then we'd like to stay in this house until we can afford a house in the Danville/Elysburg area, which is where we'd both like to live because it would cut Paul's commute in half (his commute is one hour each way right now) and also put us close to the church I'd most like to attend and yet wouldn't mean we couldn't do any of the activities the kids do right now (but I'd get to resume ladies Bible study and handbells and I really miss both of those). The houses in those towns are more expensive than where we live right now so that will only happen if I start making a fair amount of money.
I contacted the realtor today and she said she'll be by tomorrow or Tuesday to remove the sign and the lock box. What a relief. I also contacted our mortgage broker to ask about refinancing the house as we've been paying too high of an interest rate the past 8 years and we want to refinance so that almost all of it would be from retirement loans instead of a mortgage, and we want the whole thing paid off by 2026. We've never refinanced before. This means I can put things back up around the house that I had taken down in our efforts to "stage" it for showings. Since we *might* be living here for many more years (if we can make enough to afford this house but not enough to move to Danville), we also are going to slowly start doing some projects around the house. I think the ones for 2016 are going to be to replace the flooring in the kitchen and half bathroom, repaint a few rooms (Nadia wants hers to be light purple), and get a new refrigerator before ours totally dies (it's 20 years old). We've never bought a refrigerator before. If we move next year, we'll be taking this new one with us! Next year I think we'll replace the flooring in the family room. It hasn't totally sunk in yet, but I know I am going to feel a BIG sense of relief to realize we now know where we are living for the next year. Yay!
I contacted the realtor today and she said she'll be by tomorrow or Tuesday to remove the sign and the lock box. What a relief. I also contacted our mortgage broker to ask about refinancing the house as we've been paying too high of an interest rate the past 8 years and we want to refinance so that almost all of it would be from retirement loans instead of a mortgage, and we want the whole thing paid off by 2026. We've never refinanced before. This means I can put things back up around the house that I had taken down in our efforts to "stage" it for showings. Since we *might* be living here for many more years (if we can make enough to afford this house but not enough to move to Danville), we also are going to slowly start doing some projects around the house. I think the ones for 2016 are going to be to replace the flooring in the kitchen and half bathroom, repaint a few rooms (Nadia wants hers to be light purple), and get a new refrigerator before ours totally dies (it's 20 years old). We've never bought a refrigerator before. If we move next year, we'll be taking this new one with us! Next year I think we'll replace the flooring in the family room. It hasn't totally sunk in yet, but I know I am going to feel a BIG sense of relief to realize we now know where we are living for the next year. Yay!
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