Today, I’m struggling with our house. We bought our house in April of ’07. If you look back at home pricing trends, you will see that this was just as home prices were beginning to fall. It was so early, in fact, that it was still thought that the “lower” prices at the time were still the residual of a typical slow winter market. Time would prove this explanation false, of course.
We’ve already realized our home is not big enough to entertain more than about 4-6 guests at a time, unless we use the back yard, which is not an option during the cooler months. As we begin to move closer to expanding our family, we are starting to feel a little cramped as we try to figure out how to transform one of our three bedrooms from an office, back into a bedroom. The desire for a bigger house with more space, and at least one more bedroom is growing. But with our property valued at roughly $60,000 less that what we owe on our loan, we’re pretty much stuck.
Sure, we could pay the difference in what we sell our home for, and what is left on the loan. But that first entails having the money first. We don’t have that kind of money. And even if we did, that prospect of losing $60,000 on a home we bought just three years ago does not bode well for me.
It’s frustrating seeing the sizes and prices of homes today. If we had just waited 1-2 years to buy our home, we could have had something with a lot more room, that we could conceivably be happy in for 30 years.
And then you hear about all of these government assistance programs. Yet, because we have not owned our house long enough, and because we have always made our mortgage payments on time, we do not qualify for ANY of it. I hear of people intentionally defaulting on their home loans to get out from homes they upside down in, and the government programs bail them out. So the government programs help the dishonest, and does nothing for those of us honest home owners, who unknowingly got stuck on the wrong side of the housing bubble. Here we were, thinking we were going to be building some equity, and instead the opposite has happened. We bought a home, and our equity went a long ways in the opposite direction.
Another frustration that comes with this, is the lower interest rates. We got a fairly descent rate a the time of home purchase, but then rates fell quite a bit. Again, because we are honest, on-tme bill payers, we are not able to get into these lower rates. We can’t refinance, due to our negative equity, and there is no program that qualifies us to get into these lower rates. Therefore, we have no way to lower our monthly payments.
We remind each other that God has put us in this home for a reason. Sometimes we find comfort in that, other times not so much. Today is one of those times that I’m finding it hard to take comfort in that. I do know that there IS a reason, it’s just not always easy to see that.
