Five years later - a lot to thank and appreciate.....

29th September 2008 - today was the day the US stock market had one more miserable Monday but it is also the 5 year anniversary when we moved into our current home and on this day I have a lot to appreciate and be thankful for.....Honey - this is for you!

Economy here in the US has been slowly sliding down the tube and like most housing markets around the country, values of homes in our neck of the woods have fallen a good bit. In spite of all that - because the timing of us moving into this house of ours was fortuitous thankfully this house we call home has appreciated decently since we bought.

On this 5th anniversary of this house, I have to mention how it all started. It was a winter evening in early 2001 and dear wife (DW) was visiting a family friends of ours. They had just moved into their first house. DW and they happened to embark on discussions about merits of buying a house and DW being a savvy woman that she is, collected all the information needed and promplty informed me about it. Not being as savvy and a bit shall we say....lazy.... I shrugged off her enthusiasm. Why bother with all that I said - we are so happy in our apartment.

But a wise woman that she is - she persisted and insisted that we at least meet the realtor these friends of ours referred to us. We did and he explained us the virtues of owning a house and bluntly told us we should stick to a house we can afford to pay unlike some borrowers he had seen. Thus began our house hunting and we closed on our first house - a townhome in May 2001.
Two years later we were already seeing fruits of DW's wisdom in form of rising home value. Then we began looking for a detached house. Most in the neighborhoods we were looking at were priced higher that what we wanted to fork out. DW (did I say she was wise, savvy and persistent???) kept looking at the listings as I kept saying (now with the benefit of hindsight - it clearly seems stupid) she was just being paranoid.....

Suddenly one of the houses that we were looking at suddenly listed just within our budget. We scrambled, looked at the house several times and put up an offer and luckily - in the days of crazy markets elsewhere in the area - thankfully our's was accepted with only minor negotiations.

And thus five years ago we closed on this house of ours we now call home.

So this post is for you Honey..... had you not persisted and gotten us started on this journey or succumbed to my laziness - we would not be where we are today !!! You go girl......!!!!!!!!!!!!