April 30, 2010

We are exhausted.  We haven’t done much this week outside of the condo, but the final prep on the condo was surprisingly exhausting.  I have re-organized the garage dozens of times as we continued moving things out there.  We still have space for the car to fit in, but it is scary how much stuff we have.  We have de-cluttered every room in the condo and most of the closets.  We still could make a few more improvements, but it is in great shape.  Our realtors were smiling as they walked through the unit.

Yes, we have realtors.  We signed the papers yesterday.  It is a mother/daughter team.  The mother lives in our complex which I think makes her a great representative of the unit.  She was the listing agent when we bought the unit and she has had involvement in many of the sales in our neighborhood over the last five years.  The market is not exactly hot, but there is very little inventory in our price range.  Our unit comes up as the lowest priced unit in the area with similar size and features.  We seemed to have had a pretty good understanding of current listing prices of similar units when we met with the realtor.  We thought we might list it a little higher, but since actual sales prices are a bit lower than most of the asking prices right now, we priced it a little more reasonably.

This ownership experience should give us a reasonable analysis of the true cost of living in this unit.  The unit should sell for enough more than we paid to cover the realtor commission.  With our small 15 year mortgage, we didn’t gain much equity in five years, so our cash flow nearly represents the cost of living here.  In other words, it is like we rented this unit for five years for less than $900 per month, a pretty reasonable cost.  The only part of the equation that is difficult to analyze is the opportunity cost of our equity.  Had we actually rented and invested our equity portion in the stock market, we would have normally expected that the returns on those investments would have offset the higher monthly rental.  With hindsight, we might look like geniuses for having put that much down on a property that protected our equity in that time period.  In short, this analysis does little to help determine whether owning or renting is a smarter choice.  We did reasonably well here, but there is a certain amount of luck associated with that. 

Of course there is more to the equation than hard numbers.  This experience has shown us the benefit of high equity percentages and low cash flow.  There is a mental health benefit to having no concerns about making payments, even if it requires tying up some net worth.  We still think it would make sense to have no mortgage on any future real estate holdings.  Of course we aren’t contemplating buying another place anytime soon.  And we do own the trailer outright, if that means anything.

Now we return to the lifestyle of keeping our place neat enough for a showing with only a moment’s notice.  This means doing our dishes immediately and keeping the floors clean.  It is already strange to put the computer away between uses.

We have implemented our likely communications solution.  We still have thirty days to return equipment and go a different direction.  We actually stuck with our local carrier.  They have an arrangement with Verizon in the rest of the country that should provide us better internet access than AT&T.  It also cost about $50 a month less.  There is a little risk of interruption if we need service or replacement equipment while we are travelling, but equipment can be mailed anywhere.  We also have the benefit of a seamless transition.  We are able to keep our land line phone number and put it to my new cell phone.  We simply kept Kris’ cell phone and just adjusted the plan to a nationwide plan.  And we bought a mobile wifi unit that will allow us both to access the internet with our computers at the same time.  Oddly, the speed of access is not noticeably different than our five year old DSL system.  It is amazing to look at this tiny little device that allows wireless communication with our laptops and wireless communication to the internet.  Technology really has come a long way in the last decade.  The days of dial-up modems through land lines aren’t that long ago.

The snow is almost gone down low.  There is still a little in the shadowy spruce forest areas, but the grass is completely exposed and even starting to green.  We have seen birch trees with actual leaves.  We have ridden our bikes a couple more times, but it still doesn’t feel like bike riding weather.  Darkness is practically gone from our lives, although if I wake up in the middle of the night, it is still dark.  We are now preparing for our first outing in the new trailer.

I finished up a project on the garage door.  When one of the torsion springs busted last year, I rigged up two extension springs to replace it on the one side.  It was working fine, but it looked a little odd having a torsion spring on one side and two extension springs on the other.  The extension springs were also a less than perfect installation with a mess of cables and two springs that acted independently.  I found a dual spring bracket on the internet, but I knew I could build one just as effective.  So I designed the bracket, figured out the required parts, built the brackets and then planned the final installation.  Since the installation requires the garage door to be held wide open with no springs attached, I wanted a detailed plan that would allow the shortest implementation possible.  The final installation went exactly as planned, although removal of the old torsion spring was more challenging than I had anticipated.  Extracting an 18 foot long assembly from the small gap between the door and the wall required Kris’ assistance.  The only concern I had was that the new spring rates were imprecisely determined.  I was pleased to find that the extension springs worked out slightly stronger than the tired old torsion springs, although I did have to reprogram the garage door opener to the new forces required for opening and closing.  The final installation looks pretty neat and was engineered for appropriate strength in every component.