ut up our own signs. 5. Do your own flyers! You know better than anyone what is wonderful about your home! And keep an eye on them so that you don’t miss that eager buyer who couldn’t find a flyer in the flyer box! 6. Be kind to humble realtors. We sold the second, newer home, through a realtor who called my husband and said he thought he had the perfect couple for it. His first question to my husband was, “Are you totally against using realtors?” My husband made a deal with him to pay just 3%, and he brought us the happy older couple, who immediately bought their first home ever. 7. It is sooo easy to arrange your own closing. You simply call a real estate lawyer, and set it up. The lawyer does all the work. (We paid $500; in a larger city it would no doubt be more.) But this is still small potatoes compared to paying that 6%! 8. We didn’t ever get around to having an open house. My husband simply made himself available to show them whenever anyone called.

We are now over a year in a town closer in with lots of train service right down the hill to DC. This, too, is a brick rambler with a basement, and about the same 70’s era as the other one. But it’s smaller, and easier to manage. And because the market changed and we are closer in we’ll actually probably not make much on this home, if we move again. But we made quite a bit on those homes and were able to put some money into this home: a pellet stove, a grass patio with redwood fence, a kitchen in the basement (we’d had an extra refrigerator from another home, and the next door neighbors were replacing their stove and hauling a very nice one off. Perfect for our needs!)

We won’t lose any money. We know how to sell our own home and we will be in THIS one for more than two years!

We know the DC market will hold our home to pretty much what we paid for it and that we can buy a wonderful home for retirement for less than half of what our current one is worth. We’ve already started looking, 30 miles north into Pennsylvania where the homes are once again less expensive. It’s a state that doesn’t tax annuities or social security, which is attractive to our coming “fixed” income situation.

There are quite a few nice homes in there for much less than $200,000.

Which means that if we have the energy and the real estate market holds pretty steady, we just might live in the next one for 2 years, improve it, and move to another. And then another, until we’re tired of it.

Because we’ve learned how easy this process is. And we’v

My husband and I accidentally fell into what I would call a “house ministry,” and made surprising money in the process!

And we’re not wealthy or real estate investors!

And absolutely the most wonderful feeling about the “accidental blessing and wisdom” was that the people who bought our homes seemed as though they’d found their pot of gold! One older couple had never owned a home before, one Hispanic family was ecstatic over all the rooms and baths and parking, another family had had to get out of their home because it was being taken for a road and needed lots of room for an extended family, and the 4th local family had been looking for years for a home with large rooms.

(I actually cried when the older couple who had never owned a home and wanted a “no-care” sort of place, literally “oohed” and “aahed” over every nick and cranny and wallpaper border of the newer smaller home. Their eyes were dancing.)

If these house sales hadn’t unexpectedly happened, I assure you, we surely never would have thought about making money this way.

So I want to give you a happy hope. Especially if you’re tired hearing about folks making killings in the stock market and the real estate market!

A thought about how to make yourself some money, without having a lot to begin with, and to simultaneously do a good service: a dynamite mix, we think, in these dicey times.

If you have any equity in your home at all you can get a home equity loan and use it to purchase a very inexpensive house, though probably not in your town. We took a $100,000 home equity from our home (whose equity had in fact jumped up quite a bit in the previous years) and bought a large very older home 60 miles away, for $80,000, leaving some money for “fixing-up.” It hadn’t been lived in for quite a few years, and was built around 1900.

(Hopefully now you may be thinking how else you could get a loan, if your home doesn’t have a lot of equity).

Our goal was to downsize both in our belongings and house size — not to make money! (We actually thought we would retire in this home.) I could still commute to my job in DC, and we loved the area.

But just the moving the first time took a lot of energy, since we did it all ourselves with a trailer we bought for the occasion. We’d been in our old home more than 15 years, and had collected even a lot of extra furniture. (We had helped some men out in our church at times, and furnished their rooms).

It developed this older home really needed actual rescuing. There was a large mobile on the property that we painted, refloored, and refurbished. Then we replaced most of the wiring and plumbing, painted the whole (large) outside and its many sheds, put in some drop ceilings and paneling, and updated the bath and kitchen, (though not, to say the least,“poshly!”)

NO, we did not do all the work ourselves. We are older, in our 60’s, I have a long work day, and my husband, while handy, hasn’t had a lot of experience in major house renewal. So we interviewed handymen we found in the phone book. And found two who were down-to-earth, would work in tandem with my husband, and didn’t charge an arm and a leg. One of them has continued to do work for us for 4 years! (My husband has learned a lot!)

But even with our handymen, we became, within a year, a bit overwhelmed by all the other things we would have wanted to do to it, and realized at our ages we wanted a newer home with not as many challenges. (In other words, we had inadvertently bitten off more than we could chew. BUT this first house had gotten us into the new town without stretching us financially before we were able to sell our original home).

Miracle of miracles! There was an “easy-care” home across the street that was 4 years old, with two large bedrooms, a bath and a half, a large kitchen/dining area, a wash room, a living room with a gas fire place, and a porch. We were able to catch the owner the day he put it on the market, and we got that one for $98,000, which we could easily pay because we had sold our original home the year previously.

We then rented the lower half of the older $80,000 home to one person we knew and the mobile, which we had updated, to a young family. We left a lot of our belongings in some of the upper rooms, to be “handled” at a later time.

To this small newer home we added a heat pump because it didn’t have central air. (One of our handymen had a used one he’d pulled from a home. It was practically new). We enclosed the little front porch and put a little balcony on the back. And I put up wallpaper border I got on sale in the kitchen and main bath.

That’s all we did to this one. And when it dawned on us our life was getting too complicated with many of our things across the street and in a house we loved but really was too small for us for the long haul, we looked for a rambler in town to consolidate everything. (Our original home before we ever moved was a big rambler with a basement with a bath and an outside entrance).

We found one across town. One that again we thought we’d live in when we retired. It was big enough for everything, so we were again consolidated under one roof, ready to sort our accumulations and pare down.

We sold the two other homes. We were ecstatically happy to be in a large brick rambler in a pleasant older neighborhood in a wonderful town.

Then the unthinkable happen. For various reasons I won’t go into, the commute into my DC job became untenable after a little more than a year in this last house. My health began to fail. So we made the decision to move in closer again, and sell this last home.

We mourned. We loved the town, and loved our home. And were certainly tired of moving!

But we moved to where there are lots of trains, but not in nearly as close to DC as we’d been. We’re in another brick rambler, we’ve been here over a year, and will be here at least another year.

Overall, we “accidentally” made close to $90,000, even given all the updates we made and the fact that we had to pay capital gains.

What’s important, we think, is that we’ve always bought in the lower end of the market. We didn’t buy a home ourselves until later in life, and we think of a home as shelter and usefulness, as opposed to grandeur or expense or neighborhood. So while the first 2 homes weren’t in a dangerous part of town, many real estate investors probably wouldn’t want to buy there in what I would call a “basic home” neighborhood.

Where people lived who were just plain happy to have a home.

We compared the price of homes in each neighborhood, and set the prices a few thousand dollars under. We knew we’d save money on the closing, we knew we’d make some money, and we opted to sell quickly rather than be greedy.

Yes, it was a hot market. But also, we had pretty much rescued the first home, which had a double lot with it. It hadn’t been lived in for years! It had character and a built-in rental income. And the smaller home could have been sold to us for $120,000 in the beginning. As it turned out, that fellow was going into bankruptcy, and was very anxious to get out from under the mortgage.

We did a lot to that last 70’s brick rambler because, as I’ve said before, we were absolutely sure we would be there forever. We enclosed the attached carport on three sides. We added a used shed, which we painted. We planted bushes and trees. We enhanced a patio with a vinyl privacy fence. We replaced (and sold) an old wood stove insert in the fireplace with a pellet stove to help with our heat since the home had HUGE older wooden windows and we couldn’t afford or bear to change them.

Before we moved in our handyman put a fresh coat of paint on all the rooms. We replaced the kitchen floor, sink, and stove. We replaced the living room drapes. We trimmed a large tree. We linked with the neighbor to pave the dirt neighborhood drive-through between our homes. We utterly changed the basement by fixing a leak, putting down indoor/outdoor carpet, putting in a small bath and kitchen, and adding lighting.

But we still will made money on this one, which we were in just under 2 years.

It didn’t take long to sell any of the homes.

We did have to pay capital gains on all 3 homes because we weren’t in them for 2 years. I don’t recommend this, if you can avoid it. And because of the homes were on the lower end of costs and we had made what I would call basic fairly inexpensive improvements to all of them, we were able to sell them each for the price they might have been sold to us had they been cared for. We still made money, even with the capital gains.

Are you near a housing niche that has homes a lower than the “near-the-city” price? Could you move there and still work?

Or could you take some time to go and improve the property, but rent it with the stipulation that certain days you or your handyman would be working on it?

Remember all of those improvements are tax deductible on a rental!

We have always sold the homes ourselves, or through a local for sale by owner company. It’s a piece of cake. Many of the realtors of course make you think you need them desperately. But you don’t. Allow me to make a few points :)

1. Again, fortuitously, all 3 homes were in a high traffic area. The first 2 were on a drive-through to the city street. The 3rd was in a neighborhood everyone wanted to check out. 2. Only purchase a fixer-upper in a house that fits into the neighborhood. In other words, make sure that house fits with the rest of the homes around the block. 3. Though we paid several thousand dollars for a For Sale By Owner Company in selling the first 2 homes. We got little traffic, if at all, from their web-site. And the signs they provided, while very nice, we could have gotten from Home Depot. So when we sold the 3rd home we didn’t use the company. 4. We realized with the first 2 homes we would have been better off had we simply put them in the local paper as well as in the paper of a major city 45 minutes away, where home prices were higher. This we did in selling the 3rd home, and we put up our own signs. 5. Do your own flyers! You know better than anyone what is wonderful about your home! And keep an eye on them so that you don’t miss that eager buyer who couldn’t find a flyer in the flyer box! 6. Be kind to humble realtors. We sold the second, newer home, through a realtor who called my husband and said he thought he had the perfect couple for it. His first question to my husband was, “Are you totally against using realtors?” My husband made a deal with him to pay just 3%, and he brought us the happy older couple, who immediately bought their first home ever. 7. It is sooo easy to arrange your own closing. You simply call a real estate lawyer, and set it up. The lawyer does all the work. (We paid $500; in a larger city it would no doubt be more.) But this is still small potatoes compared to paying that 6%! 8. We didn’t ever get around to having an open house. My husband simply made himself available to show them whenever anyone called.

We are now over a year in a town closer in with lots of train service right down the hill to DC. This, too, is a brick rambler with a basement, and about the same 70’s era as the other one. But it’s smaller, and easier to manage. And because the market changed and we are closer in we’ll actually probably not make much on this home, if we move again. But we made quite a bit on those homes and were able to put some money into this home: a pellet stove, a grass patio with redwood fence, a kitchen in the basement (we’d had an extra refrigerator from another home, and the next door neighbors were replacing their stove and hauling a very nice one off. Perfect for our needs!)

We won’t lose any money. We know how to sell our own home and we will be in THIS one for more than two years!

We know the DC market will hold our home to pretty much what we paid for it and that we can buy a wonderful home for retirement for less than half of what our current one is worth. We’ve already started looking, 30 miles north into Pennsylvania where the homes are once again less expensive. It’s a state that doesn’t tax annuities or social security, which is attractive to our coming “fixed” income situation.

There are quite a few nice homes in there for much less than $200,000.

Which means that if we have the energy and the real estate market holds pretty steady, we just might live in the next one for 2 years, improve it, and move to another. And then another, until we’re tired of it.

Because we’ve learned how easy this process is. And we’ve

ge mobile on the property that we painted, refloored, and refurbished. Then we replaced most of the wiring and plumbing, painted the whole (large) outside and its many sheds, put in some drop ceilings and paneling, and updated the bath and kitchen, (though not, to say the least,“poshly!”)

NO, we did not do all the work ourselves. We are older, in our 60’s, I have a long work day, and my husband, while handy, hasn’t had a lot of experience in major house renewal. So we interviewed handymen we found in the phone book. And found two who were down-to-earth, would work in tandem with my husband, and didn’t charge an arm and a leg. One of them has continued to do work for us for 4 years! (My husband has learned a lot!)

But even with our handymen, we became, within a year, a bit overwhelmed by all the other things we would have wanted to do to it, and realized at our ages we wanted a newer home with not as many challenges. (In other words, we had inadvertently bitten off more than we could chew. BUT this first house had gotten us into the new town without stretching us financially before we were able to sell our original home).

Miracle of miracles! There was an “easy-care” home across the street that was 4 years old, with two large bedrooms, a bath and a half, a large kitchen/dining area, a wash room, a living room with a gas fire place, and a porch. We were able to catch the owner the day he put it on the market, and we got that one for $98,000, which we could easily pay because we had sold our original home the year previously.

We then rented the lower half of the older $80,000 home to one person we knew and the mobile, which we had updated, to a young family. We left a lot of our belongings in some of the upper rooms, to be “handled” at a later time.

To this small newer home we added a heat pump because it didn’t have central air. (One of our handymen had a used one he’d pulled from a home. It was practically new). We enclosed the little front porch and put a little balcony on the back. And I put up wallpaper border I got on sale in the kitchen and main bath.

That’s all we did to this one. And when it dawned on us our life was getting too complicated with many of our things across the street and in a house we loved but really was too small for us for the long haul, we looked for a rambler in town to consolidate everything. (Our original home before we ever moved was a big rambler with a basement with a bath and an outside entrance).

We found one across town. One that again we thought we’d live in when we retired. It was big enough for everything, so we were again consolidated under one roof, ready to sort our accumulations and pare down.

We sold the two other homes. We were ecstatically happy to be in a large brick rambler in a pleasant older neighborhood in a wonderful town.

Then the unthinkable happen. For various reasons I won’t go into, the commute into my DC job became untenable after a little more than a year in this last house. My health began to fail. So we made the decision to move in closer again, and sell this last home.

We mourned. We loved the town, and loved our home. And were certainly tired of moving!

But we moved to where there are lots of trains, but not in nearly as close to DC as we’d been. We’re in another brick rambler, we’ve been here over a year, and will be here at least another year.

Overall, we “accidentally” made close to $90,000, even given all the updates we made and the fact that we had to pay capital gains.

What’s important, we think, is that we’ve always bought in the lower end of the market. We didn’t buy a home ourselves until later in life, and we think of a home as shelter and usefulness, as opposed to grandeur or expense or neighborhood. So while the first 2 homes weren’t in a dangerous part of town, many real estate investors probably wouldn’t want to buy there in what I would call a “basic home” neighborhood.

Where people lived who were just plain happy to have a home.

We compared the price of homes in each neighborhood, and set the prices a few thousand dollars under. We knew we’d save money on the closing, we knew we’d make some money, and we opted to sell quickly rather than be greedy.

Yes, it was a hot market. But also, we had pretty much rescued the first home, which had a double lot with it. It hadn’t been lived in for years! It had character and a built-in rental income. And the smaller home could have been sold to us for $120,000 in the beginning. As it turned out, that fellow was going into bankruptcy, and was very anxious to get out from under the mortgage.

We did a lot to that last 70’s brick rambler because, as I’ve said before, we were absolutely sure we would be there forever. We enclosed the attached carport on three sides. We added a used shed, which we painted. We planted bushes and trees. We enhanced a patio with a vinyl privacy fence. We replaced (and sold) an old wood stove insert in the fireplace with a pellet stove to help with our heat since the home had HUGE older wooden windows and we couldn’t afford or bear to change them.

Before we moved in our handyman put a fresh coat of paint on all the rooms. We replaced the kitchen floor, sink, and stove. We replaced the living room drapes. We trimmed a large tree. We linked with the neighbor to pave the dirt neighborhood drive-through between our homes. We utterly changed the basement by fixing a leak, putting down indoor/outdoor carpet, putting in a small bath and kitchen, and adding lighting.

But we still will made money on this one, which we were in just under 2 years.

It didn’t take long to sell any of the homes.

We did have to pay capital gains on all 3 homes because we weren’t in them for 2 years. I don’t recommend this, if you can avoid it. And because of the homes were on the lower end of costs and we had made what I would call basic fairly inexpensive improvements to all of them, we were able to sell them each for the price they might have been sold to us had they been cared for. We still made money, even with the capital gains.

Are you near a housing niche that has homes a lower than the “near-the-city” price? Could you move there and still work?

Or could you take some time to go and improve the property, but rent it with the stipulation that certain days you or your handyman would be working on it?

Remember all of those improvements are tax deductible on a rental!

We have always sold the homes ourselves, or through a local for sale by owner company. It’s a piece of cake. Many of the realtors of course make you think you need them desperately. But you don’t. Allow me to make a few points :)

1. Again, fortuitously, all 3 homes were in a high traffic area. The first 2 were on a drive-through to the city street. The 3rd was in a neighborhood everyone wanted to check out. 2. Only purchase a fixer-upper in a house that fits into the neighborhood. In other words, make sure that house fits with the rest of the homes around the block. 3. Though we paid several thousand dollars for a For Sale By Owner Company in selling the first 2 homes. We got little traffic, if at all, from their web-site. And the signs they provided, while very nice, we could have gotten from Home Depot. So when we sold the 3rd home we didn’t use the company. 4. We realized with the first 2 homes we would have been better off had we simply put them in the local paper as well as in the paper of a major city 45 minutes away, where home prices were higher. This we did in selling the 3rd home, and we put up our own signs. 5. Do your own flyers! You know better than anyone what is wonderful about your home! And keep an eye on them so that you don’t miss that eager buyer who couldn’t find a flyer in the flyer box! 6. Be kind to humble realtors. We sold the second, newer home, through a realtor who called my husband and said he thought he had the perfect couple for it. His first question to my husband was, “Are you totally against using realtors?” My husband made a deal with him to pay just 3%, and he brought us the happy older couple, who immediately bought their first home ever. 7. It is sooo easy to arrange your own closing. You simply call a real estate lawyer, and set it up. The lawyer does all the work. (We paid $500; in a larger city it would no doubt be more.) But this is still small potatoes compared to paying that 6%! 8. We didn’t ever get around to having an open house. My husband simply made himself available to show them whenever anyone called.

We are now over a year in a town closer in with lots of train service right down the hill to DC. This, too, is a brick rambler with a basement, and about the same 70’s era as the other one. But it’s smaller, and easier to manage. And because the market changed and we are closer in we’ll actually probably not make much on this home, if we move again. But we made quite a bit on those homes and were able to put some money into this home: a pellet stove, a grass patio with redwood fence, a kitchen in the basement (we’d had an extra refrigerator from another home, and the next door neighbors were replacing their stove and hauling a very nice one off. Perfect for our needs!)

We won’t lose any money. We know how to sell our own home and we will be in THIS one for more than two years!

We know the DC market will hold our home to pretty much what we paid for it and that we can buy a wonderful home for retirement for less than half of what our current one is worth. We’ve already started looking, 30 miles north into Pennsylvania where the homes are once again less expensive. It’s a state that doesn’t tax annuities or social security, which is attractive to our coming “fixed” income situation.

There are quite a few nice homes in there for much less than $200,000.

Which means that if we have the energy and the real estate market holds pretty steady, we just might live in the next one for 2 years, improve it, and move to another. And then another, until we’re tired of it.

Because we’ve learned how easy this process is. And we’v

ught we’d live in when we retired. It was big enough for everything, so we were again consolidated under one roof, ready to sort our accumulations and pare down.

We sold the two other homes. We were ecstatically happy to be in a large brick rambler in a pleasant older neighborhood in a wonderful town.

Then the unthinkable happen. For various reasons I won’t go into, the commute into my DC job became untenable after a little more than a year in this last house. My health began to fail. So we made the decision to move in closer again, and sell this last home.

We mourned. We loved the town, and loved our home. And were certainly tired of moving!

But we moved to where there are lots of trains, but not in nearly as close to DC as we’d been. We’re in another brick rambler, we’ve been here over a year, and will be here at least another year.

Overall, we “accidentally” made close to $90,000, even given all the updates we made and the fact that we had to pay capital gains.

What’s important, we think, is that we’ve always bought in the lower end of the market. We didn’t buy a home ourselves until later in life, and we think of a home as shelter and usefulness, as opposed to grandeur or expense or neighborhood. So while the first 2 homes weren’t in a dangerous part of town, many real estate investors probably wouldn’t want to buy there in what I would call a “basic home” neighborhood.

Where people lived who were just plain happy to have a home.

We compared the price of homes in each neighborhood, and set the prices a few thousand dollars under. We knew we’d save money on the closing, we knew we’d make some money, and we opted to sell quickly rather than be greedy.

Yes, it was a hot market. But also, we had pretty much rescued the first home, which had a double lot with it. It hadn’t been lived in for years! It had character and a built-in rental income. And the smaller home could have been sold to us for $120,000 in the beginning. As it turned out, that fellow was going into bankruptcy, and was very anxious to get out from under the mortgage.

We did a lot to that last 70’s brick rambler because, as I’ve said before, we were absolutely sure we would be there forever. We enclosed the attached carport on three sides. We added a used shed, which we painted. We planted bushes and trees. We enhanced a patio with a vinyl privacy fence. We replaced (and sold) an old wood stove insert in the fireplace with a pellet stove to help with our heat since the home had HUGE older wooden windows and we couldn’t afford or bear to change them.

Before we moved in our handyman put a fresh coat of paint on all the rooms. We replaced the kitchen floor, sink, and stove. We replaced the living room drapes. We trimmed a large tree. We linked with the neighbor to pave the dirt neighborhood drive-through between our homes. We utterly changed the basement by fixing a leak, putting down indoor/outdoor carpet, putting in a small bath and kitchen, and adding lighting.

But we still will made money on this one, which we were in just under 2 years.

It didn’t take long to sell any of the homes.

We did have to pay capital gains on all 3 homes because we weren’t in them for 2 years. I don’t recommend this, if you can avoid it. And because of the homes were on the lower end of costs and we had made what I would call basic fairly inexpensive improvements to all of them, we were able to sell them each for the price they might have been sold to us had they been cared for. We still made money, even with the capital gains.

Are you near a housing niche that has homes a lower than the “near-the-city” price? Could you move there and still work?

Or could you take some time to go and improve the property, but rent it with the stipulation that certain days you or your handyman would be working on it?

Remember all of those improvements are tax deductible on a rental!

We have always sold the homes ourselves, or through a local for sale by owner company. It’s a piece of cake. Many of the realtors of course make you think you need them desperately. But you don’t. Allow me to make a few points :)

1. Again, fortuitously, all 3 homes were in a high traffic area. The first 2 were on a drive-through to the city street. The 3rd was in a neighborhood everyone wanted to check out. 2. Only purchase a fixer-upper in a house that fits into the neighborhood. In other words, make sure that house fits with the rest of the homes around the block. 3. Though we paid several thousand dollars for a For Sale By Owner Company in selling the first 2 homes. We got little traffic, if at all, from their web-site. And the signs they provided, while very nice, we could have gotten from Home Depot. So when we sold the 3rd home we didn’t use the company. 4. We realized with the first 2 homes we would have been better off had we simply put them in the local paper as well as in the paper of a major city 45 minutes away, where home prices were higher. This we did in selling the 3rd home, and we put up our own signs. 5. Do your own flyers! You know better than anyone what is wonderful about your home! And keep an eye on them so that you don’t miss that eager buyer who couldn’t find a flyer in the flyer box! 6. Be kind to humble realtors. We sold the second, newer home, through a realtor who called my husband and said he thought he had the perfect couple for it. His first question to my husband was, “Are you totally against using realtors?” My husband made a deal with him to pay just 3%, and he brought us the happy older couple, who immediately bought their first home ever. 7. It is sooo easy to arrange your own closing. You simply call a real estate lawyer, and set it up. The lawyer does all the work. (We paid $500; in a larger city it would no doubt be more.) But this is still small potatoes compared to paying that 6%! 8. We didn’t ever get around to having an open house. My husband simply made himself available to show them whenever anyone called.

We are now over a year in a town closer in with lots of train service right down the hill to DC. This, too, is a brick rambler with a basement, and about the same 70’s era as the other one. But it’s smaller, and easier to manage. And because the market changed and we are closer in we’ll actually probably not make much on this home, if we move again. But we made quite a bit on those homes and were able to put some money into this home: a pellet stove, a grass patio with redwood fence, a kitchen in the basement (we’d had an extra refrigerator from another home, and the next door neighbors were replacing their stove and hauling a very nice one off. Perfect for our needs!)

We won’t lose any money. We know how to sell our own home and we will be in THIS one for more than two years!

We know the DC market will hold our home to pretty much what we paid for it and that we can buy a wonderful home for retirement for less than half of what our current one is worth. We’ve already started looking, 30 miles north into Pennsylvania where the homes are once again less expensive. It’s a state that doesn’t tax annuities or social security, which is attractive to our coming “fixed” income situation.

There are quite a few nice homes in there for much less than $200,000.

Which means that if we have the energy and the real estate market holds pretty steady, we just might live in the next one for 2 years, improve it, and move to another. And then another, until we’re tired of it.

Because we’ve learned how easy this process is. And we’v

wooden windows and we couldn’t afford or bear to change them.

Before we moved in our handyman put a fresh coat of paint on all the rooms. We replaced the kitchen floor, sink, and stove. We replaced the living room drapes. We trimmed a large tree. We linked with the neighbor to pave the dirt neighborhood drive-through between our homes. We utterly changed the basement by fixing a leak, putting down indoor/outdoor carpet, putting in a small bath and kitchen, and adding lighting.

But we still will made money on this one, which we were in just under 2 years.

It didn’t take long to sell any of the homes.

We did have to pay capital gains on all 3 homes because we weren’t in them for 2 years. I don’t recommend this, if you can avoid it. And because of the homes were on the lower end of costs and we had made what I would call basic fairly inexpensive improvements to all of them, we were able to sell them each for the price they might have been sold to us had they been cared for. We still made money, even with the capital gains.

Are you near a housing niche that has homes a lower than the “near-the-city” price? Could you move there and still work?

Or could you take some time to go and improve the property, but rent it with the stipulation that certain days you or your handyman would be working on it?

Remember all of those improvements are tax deductible on a rental!

We have always sold the homes ourselves, or through a local for sale by owner company. It’s a piece of cake. Many of the realtors of course make you think you need them desperately. But you don’t. Allow me to make a few points :)

1. Again, fortuitously, all 3 homes were in a high traffic area. The first 2 were on a drive-through to the city street. The 3rd was in a neighborhood everyone wanted to check out. 2. Only purchase a fixer-upper in a house that fits into the neighborhood. In other words, make sure that house fits with the rest of the homes around the block. 3. Though we paid several thousand dollars for a For Sale By Owner Company in selling the first 2 homes. We got little traffic, if at all, from their web-site. And the signs they provided, while very nice, we could have gotten from Home Depot. So when we sold the 3rd home we didn’t use the company. 4. We realized with the first 2 homes we would have been better off had we simply put them in the local paper as well as in the paper of a major city 45 minutes away, where home prices were higher. This we did in selling the 3rd home, and we put up our own signs. 5. Do your own flyers! You know better than anyone what is wonderful about your home! And keep an eye on them so that you don’t miss that eager buyer who couldn’t find a flyer in the flyer box! 6. Be kind to humble realtors. We sold the second, newer home, through a realtor who called my husband and said he thought he had the perfect couple for it. His first question to my husband was, “Are you totally against using realtors?” My husband made a deal with him to pay just 3%, and he brought us the happy older couple, who immediately bought their first home ever. 7. It is sooo easy to arrange your own closing. You simply call a real estate lawyer, and set it up. The lawyer does all the work. (We paid $500; in a larger city it would no doubt be more.) But this is still small potatoes compared to paying that 6%! 8. We didn’t ever get around to having an open house. My husband simply made himself available to show them whenever anyone called.

We are now over a year in a town closer in with lots of train service right down the hill to DC. This, too, is a brick rambler with a basement, and about the same 70’s era as the other one. But it’s smaller, and easier to manage. And because the market changed and we are closer in we’ll actually probably not make much on this home, if we move again. But we made quite a bit on those homes and were able to put some money into this home: a pellet stove, a grass patio with redwood fence, a kitchen in the basement (we’d had an extra refrigerator from another home, and the next door neighbors were replacing their stove and hauling a very nice one off. Perfect for our needs!)

We won’t lose any money. We know how to sell our own home and we will be in THIS one for more than two years!

We know the DC market will hold our home to pretty much what we paid for it and that we can buy a wonderful home for retirement for less than half of what our current one is worth. We’ve already started looking, 30 miles north into Pennsylvania where the homes are once again less expensive. It’s a state that doesn’t tax annuities or social security, which is attractive to our coming “fixed” income situation.

There are quite a few nice homes in there for much less than $200,000.

Which means that if we have the energy and the real estate market holds pretty steady, we just might live in the next one for 2 years, improve it, and move to another. And then another, until we’re tired of it.

Because we’ve learned how easy this process is. And we’v

ut up our own signs. 5. Do your own flyers! You know better than anyone what is wonderful about your home! And keep an eye on them so that you don’t miss that eager buyer who couldn’t find a flyer in the flyer box! 6. Be kind to humble realtors. We sold the second, newer home, through a realtor who called my husband and said he thought he had the perfect couple for it. His first question to my husband was, “Are you totally against using realtors?” My husband made a deal with him to pay just 3%, and he brought us the happy older couple, who immediately bought their first home ever. 7. It is sooo easy to arrange your own closing. You simply call a real estate lawyer, and set it up. The lawyer does all the work. (We paid $500; in a larger city it would no doubt be more.) But this is still small potatoes compared to paying that 6%! 8. We didn’t ever get around to having an open house. My husband simply made himself available to show them whenever anyone called.

We are now over a year in a town closer in with lots of train service right down the hill to DC. This, too, is a brick rambler with a basement, and about the same 70’s era as the other one. But it’s smaller, and easier to manage. And because the market changed and we are closer in we’ll actually probably not make much on this home, if we move again. But we made quite a bit on those homes and were able to put some money into this home: a pellet stove, a grass patio with redwood fence, a kitchen in the basement (we’d had an extra refrigerator from another home, and the next door neighbors were replacing their stove and hauling a very nice one off. Perfect for our needs!)

We won’t lose any money. We know how to sell our own home and we will be in THIS one for more than two years!

We know the DC market will hold our home to pretty much what we paid for it and that we can buy a wonderful home for retirement for less than half of what our current one is worth. We’ve already started looking, 30 miles north into Pennsylvania where the homes are once again less expensive. It’s a state that doesn’t tax annuities or social security, which is attractive to our coming “fixed” income situation.

There are quite a few nice homes in there for much less than $200,000.

Which means that if we have the energy and the real estate market holds pretty steady, we just might live in the next one for 2 years, improve it, and move to another. And then another, until we’re tired of it.

Because we’ve learned how easy this process is. And we’ve come to be not TOO attached to our homes.

. . . It’s just so nice to make other people happy. The ones who, like us, struggled to buy even their first home. And it’s restful not to have to depend on the stock market.

We’ve learned along the way that just improving the baths and the kitchen, and improving curb appeal, goes a very long way. And creating more storage by putting a floor in an attic, or in a basement crawl space, or adding a shed, or a closet.

And here’s maybe something else to think about: we haven’t made a fortune, but we’ve made more than we would have made in the stock market with our money.

Without the indigestion.

I hope I’ve given you some financial hope. Cyndi White, Copywriter