How not to buy a house.

Posted by Matt Rose Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:53:48 GMT

  1. Do not buy the first house you see
  2. Don't get into a bidding war
  3. Don't buy a house without the following conditions
  4. House Inspection
  5. Financing
  6. Give yourself lots of closing time
We broke all those rules. Yet we still ended up with a fantastic house. The story starts almost three weeks ago, when Liz was looking at MLS on a lazy saturday and said, "we should go look at this open house tomorrow", we thought about it, and 2 pm rolled around the next day and we discussed it some more, and we were both a little uneasy about seeing the house: Liz; "It's a big deal, it just weirds me out a bit" Me: "I'm just afraid we're gonna want to buy it" Liz: "No, we won't, it won't have a backyard, or a basement, it'll be terrible, besides it's a huge investment, we won't just buy the first thing we see" Me: "Like our car, or our dog..." Needless to say, a half hour later we found ourselves asking: "So, how do you buy a house?" We got the name of a realtor from our parents, who had just bought a house the same weekend we got married. We met with the realtor at the house a couple of days later, and she said... "This house is so hot we're going to need oven mitts, you better think about how much you want this house, because if you want, we're going to have to go all in, and make an offer with *no* conditions, no house inspection, no financing conditions, you're going to have to make an offer that doesn't just compete on price, but makes it easier for the seller to sell to you than any other offer" So Liz and I thought about it overnight, and decided we wanted to go all in. We arranged for a house inspection on a house we didn't have an agreement to buy, and we met with our wonderful financial advisor, who jumped through all the hoops, and even possibly bent a few rules to make sure that we could ensure that financing was in place, before even putting an offer on the house. The seller started accepting offers at 7pm the next saturday evening, so we met saturday afternoon and discussed offers. We decided to on two numbers. If there were no other bidders, we were going to go under the asking price, and if there were other bidders, we were going to go with an offer that was significantly over the asking price, with no conditions, and a closing date of two weeks. We were hoping that would be no other offers that night. A few hours later, I got a text message (as a sidenote, we did an amazing amount of communication over text messages. The last time I had a celphone was before the days of SMS, so this whole text messaging thing was a weird novelty), saying that there was at least one, and probably three other offers on the house. OK, big offer. We all trooped down to the realtors office at 6:30, and filled out the offer sheet, since we were all kind of mad at being made to spend our saturday night at a realtors office, we made the offer close at 7:45. The seller didn't make it 'til 7:15, so we presented our offer, and the other three bidders presented their offer, and we spent a very tense 15 minutes, and when the seller's agent came in at 7:30 and said that our offer had been accepted, the looks on our faces must have been something to see, because the seller's agent said "Don't look so shocked!" So monday, I went looking around at Insurance. The House Inspector had said that the 60A incoming circuit would be a problem getting insurance. I still can't figure out why, as the less electricity coming into the house, the less chance of fire, but there you go. And I discovered that when you say your house is over 50 yrs old, getting insurance is much more involved of a process that takes running back and forth between me, the broker, and the insurance inderwriter. That was dealt with by Wednesday of last week, and then, it was pretty quiet for a week. A week of painful waiting. Both Liz and I like things to be 100% assured, and for a week, things were almost 100% sure, but not a done deal yet, so neither Liz nor I slept very well that week. On Tuesday, we met with the banker and signed a few more papers, and she went over the mortgage. Thursday, we went to the Lawyer's office and signed our names what seemed like thousands of times (a whole bunch of documents, three copies of each, with each page initialed by both Liz and I) And ta-da! Friday afternoon, Liz went and picked up the keys. Today.... Moving. Ugh. I hate moving.

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Unconventional downtime notification

Posted by Matt Rose Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:11:01 GMT

The Folkwolf services will be temporarily unavailable sometime in the near future, hopefully this weekend, as I am moving into my new house.

That is all.

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The Onion's prescience amazes me more and more each day

Posted by Matt Rose Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:08:37 GMT

After Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades, I realized that The Onion was some kind of hilarious Oracle. Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' has once again proved my faith. The following was written Eight Years Ago
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years. "You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?" On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.

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A brief history of the US Credit Crisis.

Posted by Matt Rose Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:40:56 GMT

Another blogger and friend is obsessed with the NPR program, this american life, she does a lot of driving in the course of her workday, and she loads it up to listen to while driving around. I don't drive around that much, so I don't actually get to listen to long-form radio shows that often, but someone on the well pointed out these two episodes of the show, that listened to in the right order (I listened to them in the wrong order) basically lay out in a very compelling narrative, the last 6 months, what led up to the global credit crisis, and how we got to where we are today. This episode, "The Global Pool of Money", aired in May, and actually sugues nicely into the episode that was just recorded last week, called "Another Frightening Show About the Economy"

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Open letter to people that want to use open wifi connections

Posted by Matt Rose Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:33:06 GMT

If you use up all of the bandwidth of somebody who was generous enough to leave their wifi connection open, and make their internet connection dog slow.

  1. They will notice you.
  2. You'll probably piss them off enough to close it off

That is all, thank you

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Jane Hirshfield

Posted by Matt Rose Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:21:27 GMT

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, Zen buddhist, and all around great woman, who regularly on the well (The oldest chatroom on the internet) tosses off phrases like the following.

Rwanda was not a place where people routinely went around chopping one another into pieces on a scale of 800,000 at a go. Rhetoric matters. There are embers in every heart that even its owner may not be aware of until they are fanned into flame.

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Time Machine is the shiznit

Posted by Matt Rose Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:29:57 GMT

I was able to buy a new hard drive, plug it into my macbook, boot from the Leopard install CD, and restore all the contents from my last Time machine backup (an hour ago), and have my computer back up and running exactly the same way it was in 2.5 hours. It's fantastic

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Hello, Q? We have a problem with your new gadget

Posted by Matt Rose Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:23:56 GMT

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Looking to buy a PC

Posted by Matt Rose Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:27:52 GMT

I've decided to re-join the dark side, and get another PC with (ewww) windows. Problem is, the last PC I bought was probably about 8 years ago, and I have no idea what I'm looking for anymore. Basically I want it to play games, but I'm not looking for a hardcore gaming machine.

I'm asking the lazyweb where to buy a PC in Ottawa, I went to Best Buy, and they didn't have anything compelling there, and I went to Future Shop, but I couldn't get a sales-guys attention, even though I was standing around in the computer aisle playing halo for at least 10 minutes...

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bad geek humour

Posted by Matt Rose Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:52:00 GMT

(04:09:53 PM) iws: killer koala
lazy lemur

(04:10:18 PM) netfrost: didn't we go through this the other day?
(04:10:35 PM) iws: you and matt may have, but not in channel (i don;t think)
(04:10:51 PM) netfrost: yeah it was
(04:10:56 PM) netfrost: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames
(04:11:00 PM) mattrose: nihilistic numbat
(04:11:06 PM) netfrost: mushy monkey?
(04:11:07 PM) netfrost: wtf
(04:11:32 PM) mattrose: better.  nihilistic nene
(04:12:12 PM) mattrose: obese ocelot
(04:12:17 PM) iws: Moonlight Minnow!
(04:12:25 PM) netfrost: crackheads
(04:12:27 PM) iws: Mad Meerkat
(04:12:39 PM) mattrose: pissed off panda
(04:12:45 PM) netfrost: HAHAHA
(04:12:58 PM) iws: Queer Quail
(04:13:29 PM) iws: Rabid Raven
(04:13:44 PM) iws: Saucy Skunk
(04:13:59 PM) iws: n/m
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