House Deal

So, we've finally reached a deal. It's not 100% what I wanted, but it's not too bad, either. The price of the house will be $116,950. The landlord will pay $4,000 in closing costs and points, as well as the estimated $3,500 to repair the point of sale violations. That actually brings him down to $109,450 for his net. HOWEVER, he STILL has to pay the realtors a total of $7,847.50 (half of this amount to his realtor, half to mine), bringing his grand total net to $101,602.50. The funny thing is, near as we can tell, he OWES somewhere around $109,000 on the house, as he took out two mortgages (1999 and 2001) totaling about $130,000. So, he's hopefully STILL left holding the bag with a bit of debt, which is no less than he deserves considering what an asshole he's been over the last twenty-one months...

Now, I have to complete the loan application, get a home inspection, and get to closing. We're putting down 20% ($23,390), thanks to my in-laws, and we'll have a loan of less than $100,000 ($93,560, to be exact). Our mortgage payments should be no more than about $540 a month, plus property taxes of about $360 per month. Come December, I'm going to apply to the county auditor to get my property taxes lowered by about one third based on the sale price. They're usually pretty good about lowering the taxes, which is great, and then our monthly tax payment will only be about $240 per month. Also, they usually make the change retroactive to the date of purchase of the house, which is even better, and credit the surplus to the next period's taxes.

All in all, a pretty good deal. Once we close, I'm going to start stripping the wallpaper off the walls (pretty much ALL of it is in pretty poor taste, but we couldn't do anything about it, and I CERTAINLY wasn't going to make improvements to someone else's property at my own expense), starting with the dining room, since the paper already coming off, and the master bedroom because the color of the wallpaper is puke yellow and really quite nauseating... We're going to paint everything a nice, neutral off-white.