Bob Martens

Probably time for me to update everyone on our housing situation once again. As many already know, we have been looking for a house and working with the bank to get financing at the same time. Our student loans were the blocking point for the financing for a while even though we had found a house both my wife and I liked and wanted to put an offer in on.

Well, last Friday we received notification that we had been approved for a mortgage. Sadly, it was for less than we were hoping (see above comment about student loans) but we decided to go ahead and put in an offer anyway just to see what would happen and because we wanted to move things ahead and quickly as possible.

We have had a wonderful realtor working with us through the buying process and she was able to get us in today (Saturday) to walk us through the offer process and get our first offer in. It was a 2 1/2 hour process mainly because I can’t stop talking when working with people (I need to apologize to my coworkers again for that), but we put in our offer right before 5pm on Saturday.

Lo and behold, we found out that our offer was accepted later that night! To say that we are excited would be a gross understatement. We both are still in a state of shock, but we could not be happier at the moment. The whole process has been great so far, with both our mortgage officer and realtor willing to work with us through any road blocks or issues we might come up against.

Now we just forge ahead with all of the stuff that needs to get done before closing in a little over a month. We are quietly hoping that we will be able to move that closing date closer to the beginning of February, but that will be contingent on how quickly we can get things done on our end and if we can work that out with the seller. All of that aside, we are on our way to owning our first place and once again having a home of our own!

I’ll make sure to toss up a picture in the future once we are farther along in the process. Until then: does anyone have a snowblower for sale?

So our family currently owns two vehicles from (alright, we own one and the bank currently lets us use the other): a 2005 Ford Freestar and a 1996 Toyota Corolla. You can guess which vehicle is mine, it won’t take you long.

With the move coming up I’ve been debating whether keeping two vehicles is both needed and/or beneficial. Milwaukee has a bus system which can pretty much get you anywhere, but I have no experience actually riding it to and from work. Couple that with the fact that we are not going to know where we are going to be living for the mid-term and I really can’t make a decision as to what to do at this moment.

Part of me would really like to ditch the second vehicle (the Corolla which is very dear to me) and just swing it with one vehicle and riding the bus. Only having to pay for maintenance, insurance, gas, etc. on one automobile sounds like sweet music to my ears. It is a minimalistic approach to living that is appealing to me at the moment.

However, losing the second vehicle also limits us in many ways. If the van needs work, we will not have a second vehicle around to use. If I work late, I’ll still have to take the bus, I’ll be limited by the schedule the bus has (which can lengthen the commute considerably) and we also lose an asset we actually own.

So it becomes a conflict for me. Right now no decision will be made. I am driving the Corolla (complete with two cans of freon added as of tonight) to Milwaukee where I will use it to get around for the short term. I will be taking stock of the amount of money we are going to be sinking into it over the next month or so and then compare that to a month-long bus pass along with time constraints of the ride to see if it might be a better fit for us to just go with one automobile.

This could also be remedied by having teleportation devices.