Friday, February 19, 2010

Just bottom-line it for me

Have you ever noticed that when politicians or celebrities are interviewed (mostly politicians) and they are asked a point blank question, they usually answer with a round about answer that never actually answers the question they were asked?  That really annoys me.  I’m the type of person, that if I ask you something, tell me what I want to know.  Don’t give me a bunch of stuff that I didn’t ask for.

I’m having a few issues with the G-man’s teacher right now.  When I logged onto the school district’s website this morning, I looked at his grades and saw about 5 or 6 missing assignments.  This is not a new occurrence, nor is the fact that I haven’t gotten any notes about missing work, I had to discover this little fact all on my own.  Most teachers send a note home every week saying if there is missing work, or not, and if there is, what it is that they are missing.  I don’t believe that we have even had one of these notes this year from G-man’s teacher.

When I have discovered this before, I sent in a note saying that G-man has some missing assignments, and asked for those to be sent home so we could do them.  What came home was just a mess of stuff from his desk, none of which were the actual missing assignments.  So the last time, I thought I would try a different tactic.  Thinking I needed to be more specific, I printed out the page of his scores and highlighted the missing work, and asked for those things to be sent home.  Well, the same thing happened.  So today, I am going to have to go in and talk to her after class and try and pin her down.  She’s usually very vague in what the assignments are, and sometimes I have a hard time keeping up with her thought process, no wonder the G-man is struggling.  Very frustrating!

We are going with our soon-to-be real estate agent (we still haven’t actually signed a contract) to look at some houses this afternoon.  There is one house that we are going to look at that is in a fabulous area, has great square footage and is at a fantastic price.  The problem is that it is a short sale.  In case you’re not sure what that is, a short sale is when the owners of a house owe more than what they can sell the house for and the bank is willing to take a loss just to sell the property.  Usually you can get a great deal when you buy short sales, the problem is, they can take forever. 

What we know, because we have done our homework, is that most of the time, the listing price for a short sale is completely arbitrary.  The agent and homeowner can list the home for whatever they want.  That doesn’t mean that the bank will actually take that price.  The bank will usually take about 88% of what is owed on the home.  Which, in this case I’m sure, can be a far cry more than what is listed as the asking price.

When I was talking to our agent this morning, he was going on about what a great opportunity this house could be and what a great deal it is.  He seemed a bit surprised when I didn’t share his enthusiasm quite as much.  I told him that I wanted him to get me a realistic number for that house because I knew that the asking price wasn’t.  They have been dropping the price just so they can get an offer to stall the foreclosure process.  I think our agent will find out soon enough that I am not interested in his fluff and his sales pitch.  I want the bottom line numbers.  I want to know exactly how much it is going to cost me.  I don’t put a lot of stock in conjecture, I want solid numbers.  I don’t care how much I like a house, if I can’t afford it, then that’s it.  There’s no such thing as “stretching ourselves” in my book.  It will be interesting to see how this whole house hunting process goes!

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