January 10, 2014: No Refinancing

While at work I followed up on our house refinancing situation just to discover that we were pushed to do something clearly foolish and all of the public data that we collected isn’t useful and the bank’s opinion is that the house is worth far less than anything we could look up (all private data that they keep to themselves so that they can collect fees while they privately determine if they want to do this or not) so there is no value in us attempting to refinance our house. We would have to put tons of money into the refinancing process – more than makes sense at all. So we are screwed after all of the work and money that we put into that already.

I got home and we spent the evening discussing the house. We are extremely displeased with the bank which we feel really pushed us to make a quick buck and mislead us unethically into considering something we had never even thought about previously when they should have had a pretty good idea that this was insane and would never work. The degree to which their figures are different than the public ones are on the house is so dramatic that it is difficult to consider that there is an honest process going on. We certainly did our diligence to make sure that the risk on this process was very low.

So we discussed it and the decision is that we need to unload the house. We just aren’t happy with it and if we can’t refinance it it probably does not make sense. We might try to rent it out in the relatively near future or just try to sell it, we are not sure. But staying in the house long term seems like a bad idea. The house costs too much, especially with the home owners association fees, and is way too far from the office for me and is in NY which we love but with the desire to home school is just way too much of a pain. If we move to Connecticut I can be near the office, get tons more time at home, save money on the commute and homeschooling is super easy. It just makes more sense given our current situation. We only moved into the house in order to refinance it.

Liesl was not happy with that conversation. She loves the house and wants to stay there. Much moreso than she wanted to stay when we lived in Texas, which we found very surprising. She is like me and becomes emotionally attached to places that she lives. That is going to be tough for her.

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