Take a risk, play it safe

Here we are, considering buying another house!

This is very exciting, yet also stressful. We cannot sell our current house because we would have to take a loss, if we take a loss, we would loose the loan that we have qualified for. Therefore, we have opted to rent our house and become landlords. This is a coin toss situation. While we will do our best to choose the best tenant, you never really know what could happen. This part is the biggest risk.

On the flip side, we could get a larger home for an awesome price and be settled in a better spot to further extend our family and also know that we are buying a house that we do not intend to move from until we retire and would like a small 1000 sq ft home to manage.

So what do we do...well, we are still getting our ducks in order and looking at options for finding the best tenants (i.e. do we hire a management firm, find our own tenant, who will help review the credit checks). Since I have worked in credit management for 9 years, as well consider my self fiscally conservative and responsible I hope that I will be able to extend that judgment to this situation. We have also started to looked at house listings as well as viewed some homes with the realtor we have started working. Yes, this is getting serious and its for real...

Do we take a risk and hope for the best and get the larger home we have been wanting for the past few years, or do we wait and see what happens as the market slowly recovers and hope that we will get a good enough price for our house to assist us in a future purchase. While I have always been a play it safe type of person, I think the risk of getting the home we want and renting our current home is the risk I would like to take. I feel that ultimately, this risk will have the best pay off in the end. Though I may waiver at times and prefer to play it safe and not pursue it for the potential stress factor, ultimately, I feel that once we have all the info we are currently seeking and find the home we really want, everything will just fall into place and we will be happy we did it.

Not everything is easy right, sometimes we have to be uncomfortable for a period in order to get what we want long term....

Books...

Book Recommendation

The Friday Night Knitting Club

By Kate Jacobs

I read The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs as a recommendation from my mother-in-law. She had previously read a book I had really loved and recommended to her and it was so much fun discussing it with her. I thought that even though this book didn't seem to appeal to me, I wanted to read it so that in the very least I would get to have a lively and enjoyable discussion over literature with my mother-in-law.

To my surprise, I found The Friday Night Knitting Club to be a lovely and heartfelt novel. The story of a hardworking and talented woman , Georgia Walker, who as a single mom and is determined to make a full and wonderful life for herself and her daughter doing something she loves - knitting. Georgia opens a shop in New York where knitters can purchase supplies or can order custom pieces. The shop becomes a meeting place for women of all different backgrounds and circumstances who want to knit from those who are novice knitters to old pros. Of course the point of the meetings are for the more experiences knitters to help the newbies out, but really the women come to bond and support each other.

The book is a tale of broken hearts, love, and redemption. Georgia Walker is a strong character, a women of so much strength and gumption you would want her for your own friend. The rest of the cast are all strong and likable in their own right as well. A genuinely good read from start to finish.

I'm glad I took my mother-in-laws recommendation, because as is highlighted in this book and true in my own life, there is a beauty in listening and bonding with women of all ages and backgrounds. What we learn from others helps to make us whole.