You know how you find something really big to focus on and that is all you can think about? And when it turns out you can't have that really big thing and you go into a state of denial about not being able to have said really big thing? That has happened. And it revolves around home ownership.
We have been renting apartments since we were in college. We are both sick of it. This past January, my wife finally found a job after looking for a handful of years. We finally had a second income and by the time our lease in our current apartment was up at the end of September, we thought we would have money for a house. We started looking, passively, as we looked at our options. We didn't want to get our hopes too high. We started paying off more and more of our debt in an attempt to increase our credit scores. I went to a first time home owners' seminar put on by our bank to get some information we might not have known or found via the internet. We even found an area in the Twin Cities that we started to look at houses and even looked at a couple in person. After we came to the decision that buying a house is what we wanted to do, we put in paperwork for a home mortgage pre-approval to see what price range we could look at. We didn't want to fall in love with a house only to not afford it. Then we got a phone call and the bottom fell out.
My wife's employer is considered a temp agency and therefore her income will not be considered when it comes to a home mortgage. Even after talking with the loan officer about the fact that this wasn't a job that was going to be going away any time soon, some of my wife's co-workers have been employed by this temp agency at her current employer for the past five years, it was to no avail. Some questions we have had to answer revolve around going to work directly for the employer she has her job at instead of working through the temp agency. Here's the problem, the shifts that are available for this employer are either overnight (midnight to eight in the morning) type shifts or early morning (four in the morning to noon) type shifts. The fact that she drives forty five minutes each way put those shifts out of the question. So my wife has been looking for a job again, in the hopes of finding something permanent in the eyes of a loan officer. It was very disheartening, or in the words of my dad 'fucking bullshit'.
We did find a new place to live, though. So there's that positive note. We will be moving into a townhouse at the end of September. There are many positives to this move. It cuts my wife's commute time in half while only adding about eight to ten miles of a commute for me. There is way more space than we have now. There is room for a grill (MGT will once again be a thing)! We'll have a second bedroom for any visitors instead of a couch, air mattress, or hotel...as soon as we get a second bed.
So we took a totally negative situation and turned it into a positive. This will give us even more time to pay off debt. We are getting ever so closer to paying off our college loans. We will be able to stash away money for another year or two to put towards a down payment. Whenever it is that we can buy a house. Sure, it would be nice to be a homeowner and have a place to call our own, but thanks to the banks, sub-prime mortgages, and the housing bubble burst, we'll just have to stave off the American dream a few more years.
48/120
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