You are now entering the Househunting Zone

So you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. You’ve socked some money away and your house value has skyrocketed. It’s time to buy a better house. Simple? You have no idea.

Let’s just say it’s no more than $500,000. Now to get this number, you and your partner on a Sunday before you’ve had a shower, have made an Excel spreadsheet of your life, argued about priorities and determined what you wanted to spend. So when you say “no more than $500,000,” what you really mean that at $500,000 you could still make the payments with the help of prescription medication. So, with acute stress symptoms aside, let’s say 500,000 is your number.

That number doesn’t matter. Because your realtor will always turn to you and say…”Hmmm…well, can you go into the 6’s?”

So there you are with more money than you ever imagined you’d have and for the life of you, it feels exactly like it did when you had no money. You can’t afford anything. The realtor takes you to these appalling little hovels and with a straight face hands you a sell sheet for a cool half million. You look around the place. You start tallying up all the work that needs to be done to make it feel like half million dollar house. And right there before our very eyes, the house becomes a three quarter million dollar house.

On your way out of this spectacularly expensive house, you have to really work to pull the animal fur off your sweater. You can’t close the door right because it’s falling off the house. On the way to your car you start flapping your arms to work the smell 50 years of cigarette smoke out of your coat.

OK. Some of you reading this may think it’s rather charming, rather quaint to have these problems. You’re the ones that drive around in $100,000 SUVs so it’s possible to make that perilous, rocky, up-mountain climb to Starbucks each morning.

I have a friend – a really sweet person, heart of gold. And she was born into money. A lot of it. One night over drinks we were talking about my latest househunting experiences. At the time I was sweating over an offer I made for a house that from the outside was absolutely the ugliest house I have ever seen.

I talked about how we were amazed at the fact that there are no contingencies anymore. In other words…you cannot make your offer contingent on using the proceeds from the sale of your current overly-inflated-value house. To have a chance at swinging the deal, you just have to have a ton of cash up front, a stomach of iron, and take out a ridiculously large mortgage. Then you fix it later after the sale of your house…which you hope will sell for what you hope it will sell for.

My friend, her Pinot Grigio paused in mid-air, looked at me truly shaken. “You need to have a mortgage?” she said with her eyes widening.

Well, we never got the ugly house, which is probably a blessing. I mean, if you have to have a mortgage, shouldn’t the house not make you want to retch?