We Moved! Just not to our new home...

Goodbye Upper West Side, Hello South Harlem!

Our previous landlords were unwilling to extend our lease for a month or two until we close on the new apartment we are buying. We needed a place to stay temporarily and we miraculously found it in the same building we are buying in, and even on the same floor!

It's not an ideal situation (we really are mostly living out of boxes) but it's better than we could have hoped. This also means we'll probably push the closing date back a bit on the new place so we don't have to pay rent and mortgage for an entire month.

There's been so many fun things to post, but no time. Hopefully life will settle down a bit and we can get back to all of the wonderful (and cheap =) things that happen in New York City!

Housing Update: Early September 2009 (aka We Signed a Contract!)

Columbia wrote an awesome housing update for August, and for some reason we never hit the 'publish post' button. So here you are with an early September update. Why such a long gap since there was housing news? Because buying a home is stressful! Could someone have told me that... more often... with more emphasis... and then urged me to stockpile some 2 Buck Chuck and chocolate?

To summarize Columbia's eloquence:

- We put in an offer on an apt that needed A LOT of work but was in our neighborhood. We couldn't get the seller's to negotiate and their broker was not pleasant to deal with... at all.

- We started looking at apts in Central Harlem, just north of the park. It was an area a little our of our comfort zone, but was still safe. We saw a few great apts. One felt a lot like a home: was beautiful, had plenty of space and was in a well-maintained, gorgeous old building. We put in an offer (through our amazing broker Rachel) on Friday night and had a counter offer back on Saturday morning. We accepted that offer and had a verbal agreement!

This was 3 weeks ago. We did not plan for it to be so long before we signed a contract. There has been some slowness on the management company's part for various reasons. However, all of that is done with and...

TODAY WE SIGNED A CONTRACT!

And wrote a check that had a lot of zeros on it.

Everything is still not done. We need to wait for the seller to counter-sign before we are officially "In Contract" and the rest of the headaches... I mean exciting work, is still ahead. Thankfully we used the last 3 weeks to reorganize our financials and filled out all of the paperwork with our mortgage broker. It is at times like this that we are very thankful we have professionals working with us. We could NEVER do this on our own. I'm not even sure now why people try.

I am not sure we have an amazing sense of excitement. There has been a lot going on with my family, and the wait time has brought the joy down to a manageable level so that if things didn't work out we wouldn't be too disappointed. Our lease is up at the end of September and our landlords are refusing to extend it a month. Columbia started work early and the munchkin and I are making an unexpected trip to PA to help out my fam. With so much going on and so much to do I am more glad to have this major milestone behind us.

A Housing Update, July 2009

(For those playing along at home, the last update was the May 22 Housing Update.)

A lot has happened in a little amount of time, but here are the big updates and what drove us to make them:

• We've decided to stop working with ACORN, at least for the time being.
• We've reconnected with Rachel Melniker at Corcoran.
• We've gotten some helpful advice from a broker at Manhattan Mortgages

Stopping work with ACORN
On June 4th, I met with ACORN with updated paperwork and begun my 2-3 day wait for a Pre-Qual from the bank. By June 29th, I still hadn't heard back, and they had stopped returning my calls altogether. With help (see next paragraph) I was able to pick up the pre-qual on July 1st. The numbers were nothing in line with what I'd been told, and the authenticity of the letter itself appears to lack credibility. While there's been no official break, our relationship with ACORN may have outlived its usefulness (or if nothing else, our patience).

My intake package was delivered on April 4th, 2009, stretching a 10-15 day process to 3 months. There is financial incentive to working with ACORN, but working with someone who doesn't respect your time comes with its own cost: mental and financial. If nothing else, in those 3 months, the mortgage rate has increased about a half point.

Partnering with a Real Estate Agent
Never having bought before, we knew that we were going to need someone on our side to represent us. We had a great experience working briefly with Rachel Melniker last year, and we contacted her again. Within two days of working with her, she'd sent us listings, took us to an open house, made one call to ACORN and got directly connected to our MIA loan councilor, and she did some ACORN research of her own which proved very insightful.

Contacting a Mortgage Broker
When we finally got the pre-qual from ACORN, and it seemed off, Rachel suggested connecting with a Mortgage Broker, if just to get some advice and more accurate numbers. We did make the call, and it was a very smart decision. the broker gave us real numbers, explained why they were what they were, and was very generous with information and answers to our questions. With clearer numbers, we were able to better refine our search which made everything a bit less stressful.

...And compared to ACORN taking 3 months to give us a pre-qual, Beth gave us an estimate in 15 minutes.

What's Different For Us?
When you walk in to ACORN, you take a seat on faded couches and stare at a rat-bait-box across the waiting area. You walk into the back and it's a mob of cubicles and papers, and no one seems especially happy to be there. Comparatively, everyone on the private sector has been helpful, courteous and professional, and with good reason -- they're compensated based on performance. While we might miss out on potential savings at ACORN, we wonder if a transaction would ever take place. Swift action and prompt replies have made our search go from twiddling thumbs for months to looking forward to making an offer on one of a few apartments in the next few weeks.

My dad has an expression, "Never let a poet fix your sink". This comes from some DIY plumbing of his that ended up with a more serious problem, and eventually calling in a professional. We initially thought we could do it alone, you know "save some serious money", but regardless of how much you hear "you can do yourself", there's too much on the line to miss important steps or get hustled by the seller's team.

We could have exciting news in the next few weeks. A real fixer-upper might be in our future -- we couldn't be more excited or more nervous, but we think it's the right move for so many reasons. Stay tuned!

NYC is Safe (Until You're A Victim)

I came across a piece the NY Times put together called the NYC Homicides Map. You can look at murder data mapped out across the city, each grim event appearing as a pinpoint with correlating data (victim/perp age, method used, date, etc). It's not pretty to look at, but it is incredibly informing. If you are willing to understand this as a reality where we live, you might not avoid the data, but rather try to find a use for it. Just as you could get hit crossing the street or end up with a cessna flying into your bedroom, danger can happen anywhere. This data doesn't say that you'll be murdered in one particular area; it just shows where to go to increase your odds.

My immediate application for this map was to help me understanding relative safety of neighborhoods with which I'm less familiar. One such neighborhood is East Harlem, said to be one of the last good deals in Manhattan Real Estate. So we bought in to the hype, and visited an open-house that looked promising. Outside the very charming apartment, my comfort-level was challenged (especially in thinking about my girls), and this was during daylight hours. I thought maybe the map could help inform me: was it really unsafe or just my lack of knowledge of the area?

Neighborhood of the open house:
Each dot represents a murder at that location (Since 2003)


For comparison, I looked at my neighborhood.


While it's true that where we live is very quiet and safe(comparatively speaking), it's affirming to know my sense of discomfort in East Harlem had some grounding in reality.

For the a God's eye view, here's the big picture of NYC:



The map and data is really interesting and slightly disturbing all at the same time. We've already looked at other areas where we are (were?) considering buying and are wondering the following:

1. Will we let this information effect our home-buying decision?
2. Is the "sense of the neighborhood" more meaningful to us than these statistics?
3. Is there any way we can keep our families from finding this map?

Link: NYC Homicides Map [via StreetEasy Talk]

A Housing Update - meeting the loan counselor, more paperwork, and lessons learned

Did you all know? I feel like we should have known. We had to send in all of our recent financial paperwork, and we did. 6 weeks ago. Of course we'd have to give them all of our updated numbers. Why didn't we think of this ahead of time?

Besides our obvious omission, the meeting with ACORN Housing's loan counselor went well. She threw some numbers around (ones that we can work with), told Columbia what else we needed to bring in and gave us a lot of hope. The meeting also gave us some answers to those nagging questions. We will continue to work with ACORN, at least for now. The benefits they offer (no PMI, help with closing costs, etc) do seem to be worth the hassle. Also, the timing might be perfect. When we give them the newest papers (end of next week, I think) they send our packet to Citibank. Citi gets back to them in 2-3 days with the pre-authorization. That lasts for 90 days. Our lease is up in 4 months. We can always stay here a few extra months if we need to, but it would be nice if that didn't have to happen.

Here are a few things we learned from the meeting about looking good to lenders:

- Credit Cards are Important to Have: While many frugal bloggers sing the praises of cutting up your credit cards, it turns out having credit cards demonstrates responsibility to lenders. As Columbia only has 2 credit cards, we have to show proof of 'soft credit.' Thankfully our phone company and ConEd are willing to send out letters stating that we pay our bills on time.

- Credit Cards are Important to Use: While Columbia and I are longtime users of credit cards, it turns out we only use 1 now. The loan counselor knows this, as does anyone who looks at Columbia's credit report (i.e. the bank). The counselor said that not using a credit card could actually work against us. While having a card demonstrates a companies trust in us, lenders want to know we can use credit responsibly. We are going to purposefully charge on both cards each month from now on.

- Don't Cancel that Overdraft Protection, Just Make Sure You Don't Use It: Columbia and I were not on top of our finances a few months ago, and didn't transfer money to the checking account (from our high-yield savings) when we needed to. Overdraft kicked in. In the past it had not been a problem when this happened, but our bank charged us this time. Everyone's trying to earn as much as possible in this economy, I guess. We decided to cancel overdraft and be vigilant about watching our account balances (setting up reminders to do so on our Google calendar). If we could have turned back time... Overdraft protection is another form of credit and would have worked in our favor.

- It's Important to Check your Credit Reports: While Columbia has an awesome credit score (yea honey!) we didn't actually know the number until he went to the meeting. It would have been nice to be prepared. Also, there's an address on one of the reports that is inaccurate. Columbia needs to have that removed. There could have been other inaccurate information on the report that could have weighed against us. Periodically checking your credit report is not only wise, but free. Our goal will be to check every 6 months.

We have more work to do, but we also have a lot of hope. It seems like we are headed in the right direction to be home owners. The biggest challenge now seems to be not getting caught up in looking for apartments online - incase the bank's numbers are different from the loan counselor's. Oh, Street Easy, you do know how to tempt a person...

A Housing Update - the big wait is over... at least for now

We'd told you that Columbia went to an informational seminar with ACORN Housing in February. Our union has an agreement with the non-profit that makes going through ACORN's house buying program financially beneficial if you qualify (which we do). However, the process has not been especially expedient.

- February 10th: Columbia attends ACORN's mandatory information session, which was very informative and allowed for Columbia to ask a lot of questions.

- April 2nd: We mailed ACORN a detailed history of every purchase we have ever thought of making since the day of conception. In all seriousness, it's a lot of paperwork. We waited so long because Columbia got another raise that showed up on March 16th's paycheck and because we wanted our tax return to be in our bank account. At the February meeting, Columbia was told to expect a phone call about 2 weeks after ACORN received the intake packet.

- April 4th: ACORN received our paperwork. We paid for tracking. We didn't want to risk all of that paperwork getting lost in the mail.

- Then began the phone calls. Columbia's. The poor guy kept calling, and calling and calling. He left a dozen messages and never got anywhere.

- April 30th: Columbia calls again and explains to the receptionist how long the paperwork has been there and that he can't get anyone to return his calls. The person responsible for processing paperwork then takes Columbia's call. She explains that they have been working on a grant proposal and apologizes for the inconvenience. She said that she hoped to process our paperwork and call us back tomorrow (which would have been May 1st).

- May 12th: Columbia calls ACORN again and explains our saga to the receptionist, including the fact that this agency has had all sorts of personal information for 6 weeks and has not contacted us to discuss it. We received a call back within an hour informing us that our paperwork had been processed and we had been assigned a loan counselor.

- May 13th: Columbia calls the loan counselor and leaves a message (I begin this post...).

- May 14th: Columbia finds the email address for our loan counselor - the man's a sleuth! He decides not to write on a Thursday night as we think they may not work on Fridays and he doesn't want the email to get lost in the cluster of weekend emails.

- May 18th: Columbia calls and emails the loan counselor, asking her to call him.

- May 19th: Columbia gets a call from the loan counselor at ACORN and sets up an appointment for... May 20th - TOMORROW!

He scheduled it for after work and mentioned he may bring his wife and daughter with him. The counselor didn't seem thrilled. I would love to be there, and Pumpkin is very well behaved for a 14 month old, but... We'll decide tonight.

We are hoping tomorrow will bring us big answers... especially the amount of the loan for which we are eligible. The bigger answers might be 1) Should we continue to try to work with ACORN? and 2) Are the benefits from going through their process worth the hassle? I would also be happy to know if I can finally start making plans for this summer.

Foreclosures : a great oppotunity, or ambulance chasing?

I've got a moral dilemma of a dialog going on in my head lately. It goes something like this:

Me: "There sure are a lot of folks being victims of foreclosure these days..."
Angel Me: "Yes, it's true. We sure should have these folks in our prayers."
Devil Me: "True... We should wish the best for them. Say, how's that real-estate hunt going?"
Me: "Wow... funny you should mention that. Not too bad. Could always be better."
AM: "That hard work will certainly pay off. I know you trust that everything will work out for the best."
DM: "I'm sure. So what happens to these homes that are foreclosed?"
Me: "Well, the owners can't afford them anymore so they lose them."
DM: "I hear they sell for way under market-value. You should snag one."
AM: "And profit off of the misfortune of others? Do you think he has no conscience?"
Me: "No, you're absolutely right. I couldn't do that."
AM: [proudly] "See?"
Me: "How much under value?"
DM: "I have a website so you can find out."
AM: "Wow -- A 2 bedroom? For that price? Well, if this isn't a sign of God's providence, I don't know what is."
Me: "Isn't this kinda... um, morally grey?"
DM: "Well, the bank is the bad guy here putting mom and little baby joey out on the street. The damage is already done."
AM: "It's true... You'd actually be helping out the economy."
DM: "If you don't, someone else will get it."
AM: "Do you really want Pumpkin to have to grow up in a 6'x5' bedroom, always wishing her daddy loved her enough to not store root vegetables under her makeshift bed?"
Me: "What on earth are you talking about?"
DM: "Yeah, I'm kinda lost on that one too..."

...I'd go on, but it just gets weird from there. You get the point. Morally grey or just pricing based on circumstance?

[link] Free Forclosure Searching

A Home of Our Own, not just a home: how we've been doing and our future plans.

Columbia and I were talking last night and decided we needed to set a reasonable goal for ourselves. 1 post a week. It's not much, but it's SO MUCH more than we've been doing lately. Before we share our plans with you, here's how we've been doing:

Living on One Income in NYC

• Even though Columbia completed 30 credits above his masters degree (the top salary in the doe) this past summer, it took a couple of months for the transcripts to come through... then processing time... FINALLY at the end of December we got the raise, and the retro-active pay (for the day he completed the last credit). We had been just learning to break even (and not dip into our savings anymore) when this happened, so we were overjoyed for the new monthly cushion and to be able to pay back some of our savings.
• We've cut out spending even more. It's funny how frugalness really leads to more frugalness. And we don't feel like we're depriving ourselves or Pumpkin. Our families also gave us quite a few gift cards for Christmas and birthdays (Columbia's is November, Mine is in January) so we've been able to use them for special treats as well as necessities like clothing.
• Columbia found an awesome produce stand near his job in Elmhurst. He is at that school on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, so twice a week he stops there. He spends about $10 each time and gets their best deals on the best looking fruit and veggies. This week one of his hot finds was 2 quarts of beautiful strawberries for $2. His purchases there have become what we base our menus around.
• We have actually started paying into our savings again each month. Yep. We're working with an excess. I'm feel as if I should maybe erase that - just incase typing the words jinxes us or something (so the bold and italics was probably really overdoing it =). I was looking through our bank statements in February and realized that we are at the same place we were last year at this time when we had 2 salaries. We feel so blessed that I am able to stay home with Pumpkin without putting us into debt.
• Cha-Ching! Tax refund! We realize we will not get this windfall next year, but it is nice to have such a big addition to our savings. We even got a good amount back from the state, which is unheard of for us.

Our Plans

• At this point, all signs point to my staying home another year. I am thankful that the NYCDOE lets me decide on a year-by-year basis. I'm still a commitment-phob at heart, so this makes it easier on me mentally.
• We are looking to buy an apartment. Yep. Really. A 2 bedroom at that. No, I'm not kidding! The housing market has hit NYC and we are in a place where we can take advantage of it. Columbia even went to TWO open houses last Sunday and we plan on going to at least 2 more this week. Last year at this time I was telling friends that 1 bedrooms were finally coming into our price range. Now, we are seeing twice as many 2 bedrooms for that same number! Our union has worked out a relationship with Acorn Housing (they are NOT Acorn) so that we get extra perks (lower interest rates, etc). We'd went to an informational seminar several years ago and thought they were a great resource. Columbia went to another in January to start the ball rolling this time. We are nearly ready to send in our paperwork and see what our loan pre-approval number is. This will decide a lot for us. Including if we continue to look in Manhattan or start searching the outer-boroughs (Columbia, stop crying, it will be okay =). A good reminder for me has been that the apartment we buy does not need to be our home forever, just the next 5-6 years at least. This realization takes a considerable amount of weight off of my shoulders.
• One post a week. It will probably revolve around apartment hunting, where we are in the process, or how our 2 cats are not only the bane of my existence, but are crippling our chances at getting approved by a coop or condo board. Just kidding about the cats... sort of. :/

On another note, Pumpkin turned 1 March 9th! She is such a joy.

Our Birthday Girl!

(Note: this is not our apt, but a family member's home in LI)