It's happening

It's been far too long since I've posted anything here. Sorry! As soon as Dave got his offer on 10/27, it's been non-stop work around the house, phone calls to realtors and relocation counselors. This morning I'm working from home while the carpet on the basement stairs gets installed. Tomorrow Dave and I will both be home because our new granite counter tops get installed at 8am, then we have to pick up the rental car at 9am and then get pictures taken in the house for the listing. After that's all done we'll pack up the rental car (we got an SUV) and head to Nashville for the weekend. We are spending Saturday morning looking for new houses. AHHH! It's all happening so fast. That's the short of it....

Dave got his official offer on my birthday. We were on the way to dinner and pulled over so we could listen intently to the woman from Mars. Dave put the phone on speaker so I could hear everything, too. He is getting a 22% increase in salary + 15% bonus + awesome relocation package. So we nullified my wimpy relo package so we could use his. His relo doesn't include a buyout of the house, but it includes a lot of other things such as 60 days temp housing in a furnished apartment, 8 weeks of groceries paid for ($100/wk) while we're in temp housing, 3% cash back on the sale of our Ohio home if we sell in the first 60 days, two house hunting trips, one trip back to Ohio every two weeks while our home is still on the market, paid closing costs and all realtor fees, and if we buy a new home in Tenn before the Ohio home is sold they will pay for the lower of the two mortgages for up to a year. Yes, you read that correctly. It's a great setup!

We visited our financial planner this week to get advice on how best to take advantage of everything. His advice: List our OH home VERY VERY aggressively and buy a new home in TN soon. In fact, we have about $248,000 into the home, we owe about $208,000 and we're probably going to list for $230,000. Does it give you a heart attack like it gave me?!?! There are 6 houses for sale on our street and our house makes #7. We will be the second lowest house on the street which makes us very competitive. The financial planner said any equity we can get out of this house will be good plus the 3% cash back will help - it will be approximately $6,500. All in all it is very stressful but we have a lot of "downside protection" as our planner would say. Our realtor is listing the house tomorrow and will host our first open house this Sunday. Let the offers start pouring in!!!

That's it for now. At some point I'll post pics of our finished basement and our now-staged new bedroom (finished attic).

Thanks for the support!