"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." - Franz Kafka
In 1998, when I moved to, D-Town, (the city I lived in before I moved back home to live with my mom) I was just shy of 36 years old. And though I had always been interested in real estate (since I was twenty-one I used to spend my free days driving around calling about properties, looking at properties) I had never owned anything; I had always rented.
I had landed in D-town because I wanted to move from that far, far away place and really didn't care where I lived so long as I could transfer with the company I worked for. My company gave me a few different options, and though I knew no one in D-town, it seemed like the place I thought would be best for me.
Well, as it turned out, D-town was the place for me, but the job, the very same one I had in the far, far away place, turned out to be the wrong one. It was one of those instances when you realize you can have a job you really love and just a simple switch of the people you work with makes it a job you really hate. Within four months I quit.
When I got to D-town my company had referred me to a beautiful, spacious apartment in a desirable area that gave a discount to employees of our company. It was still expensive, but with the discount it made it worth the price and it was just a five minute ride to work. When I quit, I used my savings and my mom and dad helped me out while I was looking for a new job. My mom had been out to visit me earlier and she loved my beautiful apartment and the fact that it was a "safe" environment for me to be since I lived alone, she really wanted me to be able to stay there. However, after several months I got a job working for a big real estate company as and administrative assistant (I thought it would be a good way to learn about real estate). Where I had been making fairly good money in my previous job, this new job paid $6.35 an hour! My days of luxury living were numbered.
Not long after I started at the real estate agency I met a single women who said she had a one bedroom unit behind her house that wasn't quite "finished" but she could rent it to me for $300 a month - I had been paying more than twice that for my beautiful apartment. I took a look at it and it was pretty dismal - an unfinished concrete floor in the "family" room, a tiny kitchen where the roof slanted down to just a few inches above my head, a bedroom that could barely fit my blow-up bed (yep, a blow-up bed, if I haven't mentioned it before, I slept on a blow-up bed for the first three years I lived in D-town). The unit had no heating (the landlord supplied a floor heater), so needless to say, I froze my ass off in the winter. I think there may have been an a/c window unit but it wasn't nearly big enough to cool the place off in the summer. To top it off, I found out there was a huge mice problem which was not only disgusting but frightening, especially since my bed was on the floor and I could hear them in the darkness scurrying around.
At Christmas time I flew back home to my parent's house to spend the holidays with family. While there, my niece, who was in high school at the time, wanted to take me to her friend's aunt's antique shop to see all of the beautiful things she had on display. I love finding treasures and this shop abounded with them. Mind you, I didn't have the money to be buying anything, but when you have a credit card and you see lovely things, not having any money seems like no problem.
I bought two leopard-print, re-upholstered, antique armchairs, a leopard foot rest, a modern, glass chandelier, and a modern, round, red-lacquered table with four modern red "flame"chairs, a few knick knacks and a piece of artwork all for $2,000. I could only purchase the items, I told the owner, on the condition that she be able to store the pieces for as long as I needed, as I had no "home" to put them in. She said she had a warehouse and would be happy to keep them there. Sold.
For one solid year I dreamed of having a house to put my beautiful furniture in. I drove around D-town every weekend looking at houses, finding out the prices and deciding on locations. I knew that if I was ever going to be able to afford a place I had to pick a "bad" neighborhood in a "good" location and that place was downtown D-town. It felt ghetto-like when I looked at the homes, but I believed that in five to ten years time it would be the "it" place to live, so I kept my eyes and ears open for anything in that area.
But when you're making minimum wage, buying a house isn't that easy to come by. Then two things happened. First, I had been looking around for a higher paying job and got one. It would only pay $10/hour but it was a lot compared to what I was making. It didn't start for three weeks so I still had time to give the real estate agency notice. Then, second, out of the blue (I had been working at this agency for over a year), one of the realtors who worked for the company, said he had heard I was interested in buying a home and offered to help me out. I told him I where I wanted the house to be and he found a couple of listings and we jumped in the car and went to look at them.
The first couple of homes were nice but over my price range - they were $60,000 - $75,000. I had told the realtor I had $20,000 I could put down toward the house - money that I had earned and put in a 401K plan in that far, far away place I lived before D-town. The last place he showed me he said was in the sketchiest neighborhood, but he said the price was right. He told me it wasn't actually quite on the market yet so we couldn't get inside to see it, but the asking price was $39,900. As he started driving to take me over there to have a look at it, I got more and more excited because he was going directly towards the "bad" neighborhood that I really wanted to live in.
And there it was; a house on a block with a paint and body shop as its only neighbor on the north side of the road. Like I said, we couldn't go in it, but I didn't need to. It was a cottage-style house built in the 1930's. You could tell it needed work but not on the roof and that was key; the roof looked fairly new. I asked him to offer the seller $30,000 on the condition that I did get to take a look inside before I bought it. He made the offer and the seller didn't even counter. I bought a house for $30,000 and when I called and told my dad the first thing he said was, "What is it, on wheels?" And because I now had a job that was making $10/hour I qualified (by also using my 401K money) for a $50,000 loan. I had $30, 000 dollars to fix the inside of that house up and make it my home and it needed every penny of it!
But the moral of this story is that I believed before I saw - I bought those gorgeous pieces of furniture when I was making minimum wage and living in a mice-infested house, with no heating and an unfinished concrete floor; a living hell-hole. But some how my soul must of have known that a home of my own was on the the way and when I saw that furniture my soul connected with those pieces knowing that they would look perfect in a 1930's cottage bungalow.
And now I've gone and done something similar.
Although I only get a small stipend from my family for taking care of my mom, I don't really have any expenses so over the past few years I been able to save some of it. And last September I was thinking this money is being wasted sitting in a bank account, I need to invest it. But then I had the thought that some day (hopefully years from now!) when I no longer have my mom, I will need a place of my own. My property in D-town is a good income property now and I can always move back there, but, I thought, I do like my hometown, and I always want to have some connection to it.
But with so little money I knew I couldn't afford to buy a home now and seven years down the road the place I would most like to live - you got it, the sketchier side of the downtown area - would probable have become too gentrified and out of my price range. But, I thought, right now I can afford to buy a cheap vacant lot, put a small amount down and talk the seller into financing the rest over a seven year period. I figured in this economy the seller making a 5% return on investment would be doing pretty good.
So, once again I drove around looking at vacant lots. I called one realtor on a lot I wondered what the price was. I told him what I was interested in. He met me at the lot he represented but told me if his lot didn't work for me he could look up some others. I had two I was already interested in visualizing what it would be like to live in those locations and then this realtor called me up and said he found a lot that I might like even better. I met him to look at it. It wasn't a corner lot like the other two (and what I wanted) but it was on the north side of the road and would get plenty of good sunlight. It was not quite as close to the downtown area, but only a little more than a mile more. It too was a nice lot and I had a decision to make. I knew I was going to purchase one of the lots, but which one?
And then, without being prompted by anything I said or did, the realtor said, "This lot would be a great place to build a home and raise kids. There's a large, beautiful, newly built recreation park a block away." Him saying that, out-of-the-blue, not knowing anything about me or my "quest" was like a sign from God saying, "This lot is the one for you." Along the lines of, "If you buy it, they will come...." I bought it. Life (at least my life!) is strange that way, believing in something without really knowing, and then discovering the believing was the knowing.
