A few more houses hit the market in Winsted this week. At least one of them is bigger than ours and is listed for about $50,000 less than what ours is listed at. We did lower the price a little, but we’re almost out of range of what we can afford to sell it for. I feel like I need to accept the fact that we’re not going to be able to sell our house for quite a while. It’s discouraging. The housing market has been getting better, but it’s still not great and the average amount that houses are going for in Winsted is only about $100,000. We owe $148,000 on ours and it costs money to sell a house (closing costs). That’s just the way it is.
It’s a hard pill to swallow. Some of our costs have gone down since we moved, Nathan makes more money, and we no longer have any debt beside our mortgage. But we need to put aside money for health costs (we have to pay the first $7,000 out of pocket) and dental costs, car repairs and replacement, and travel to see family (no fancy vacations here– just road trips to MN/WI) and our rent here is $1250/month and there are no less expensive options for a family of 5 that wouldn’t dramatically increase our commute cost for Nathan and we don’t make so much more money that all these extra expenses don’t matter. We are also dealing with having our rent income only cover 65% of our mortgage/taxes/insurance costs (on a good month) and there are some additional big expenses that we will need to cover if we have that house much longer.
And that’s not touching the emotional issues that come with not having our own place to call our own. It’s difficult.
The simple answer of “just wait for the market to get better” before selling isn’t so easy either. I think it would be easier if the house we were trying to sell was newer or if we weren’t losing a substantial amount of money on it each month. We’ve had some big expenses come up that we’ve had to cover. The possibility of that continuing to be the case is very high- especially with a house that is a little older. In the meantime, house prices in this area keep going up.
So, that’s where we’re at. Please pray that we’ll have some clear direction on what to do. If we were in ministry, we could have a fundraiser, but we’re not. So, we’ll have to watch and see how God works in other ways.