The Plan

As you may recall, we announced back in January that 2009 was to be the year of the move back to Chicago!! We entertained high hopes of having a quick home sale, bring in some equity and maybe even do the whole For Sale By Owner route to keep some of said equity.

...

And then the market crashed. Hard. Hopes of selling were quickly fading away, and I was adamant that we not rent for fear of getting bad tenants and trying to manage a property from so far away. Plus I didn't think we could get what we needed to cover the place anyway.

And we can't forget the kitchen sink debacle which set us back several weeks. Ug.

But still, we persevered and met with a couple of real estate agents. We chose these agents based on the referral who told us they will give it to us straight. And boy howdy, did they ever. Bottom line? Don't sell this year. Unless of course you want to come to closing with a big fat check. Of course it doesn't help to have a short sale and foreclosure looming in your neighborhood either. That yanks the home values down that much further.

At this point, I was becoming pretty despondent. Getting back to Chicago this year was looking grim and next year wasn't holding any promises. But Caiden isn't getting any younger, and the longer we spend here, the less opportunity he is going to have to build memories with our families.

So we came back to the table to re-visit the rental option. After doing quite a bit of research and deep thinking, I started warming up to the idea. We'll only have about 2/3 - 3/4 of our costs covered by a renter, but it's better than being stuck here indefinitely. We started interviewing property management companies and finally settled on Terri from CB Bain. We liked her personality, her work history and felt she was pretty motivated.

But of course we can't make it that easy on ourselves. Before we committed to renting, we decided to investigate the re-finance option. See, we have an ARM on our mortgage that expires in Jan of 2011. If we can't sell in 2010, we risk having our mortgage payment go up. After lots and lots of conversations with our lender and various brokers, we decided the price tag was just too high to justify the modicum of security a re-fi into a 30 yr fixed would offer. But yay! A decision made! And now we wouldn't have to wait around for an extra 4-6 weeks for a re-fi to process which means we could get on the rental market that much sooner.

So at long last, here we are. Our listing went live Tuesday afternoon. We've got our fingers, toes and eyes crossed that this goes well and we get a renter soon!

Next steps from here? Well, we need to figure out how we're gonna move and where we'll land until we buy a house. We're pretty sure that long term we want to live in Sycamore. We've been looking at houses there and have seen some that we really like. Sycamore has the extra benefits of both being fairly central to everyone AND super close to my sister, Cathy. W00 hoo!!

Please keep your fingers crossed for us!! And send any renters our way! ;)