Burton and I decided that the lowest cost option with the highest likelihood of maintaining our current jobs is to do the following:

1. Buy our next home.
2. On closing, move most of our belongings into the new house. This clears out the old house so it’s more easily cleaned up to be sold.
   • ~$500 for a one way 20′ UHaul (It would have cost about $1000 to hire movers to move all our stuff, but then we would have timing issues with our jobs, discussed below.)
   • ~$300 in gas for UHaul and our personal vehicle, whom we affectionately call Freya
3. Hire general contractors to repaint the interior of the house
   • ~$1800 to repaint most of the interior, including 1 half bath, living room, 2 bedrooms, hallways, re-caulk everywhere
4. Hire realtor to sell our home
   • ~5% of the home selling price.
   • I used UpNest to find my realtor and greatly appreciated the ease & efficiency with which Upnest connected me with realtors. This service seems revolutionary to me. It changes the home selling business from a nebulous time-consuming exchange, into a process where home sellers and realtors alike are able to cut through any bullshit, lay out their terms, highlight their value, and make an agreement.
5. Prepare to move to new house full time in about 2 months

The benefit of the above plan is two-fold:

1. It guaranteed that we had a place to move into.
   • Rather than blankly giving our work notice, then possibly moving into a rental home, after which we’d move again, in this plan we move directly into a place where we have home equity. We understood the relative magnitude of buying and selling a new house, so this was something we took time to think about and proceeded only after committing to this project.
2. Gave us some flexibility in timing.
   • While we’ve played with the idea of moving for a while, we made an intentional decision to move around end of February. At that point however, we were unsure of whether we should buy land or a temporary (5-10 year) new home.
   • Throughout February-March, we trolled online home listing websites to get a feel for the market and communities we were interested in moving into. By around March, we decided that we would like to move sooner rather than later, but were in a quandary: realtors say spring time is the best time to list a house for sale… and spring was approaching. If we wanted to hit that time frame to sell our house, we needed to move fast. We considered renting out our house, but the prospect of maintenance from 500 miles away was unattractive, and the cash on cash return we’d get is: ($3600/$50,000) = 7.3%– we thought we could do better and having extra cash was bonus.
     • Monthly Profit: Monthly rental income – (mortgage + property management expenses ) = $2000-($1500 + $200) = $300
     • Annual Profit: $300*12 = $3600
     • $50,000: Not following the cash on cash formula exactly, this is the rough profit we anticipate if we sold our house, and not what was invested into the house over the past seven years. I use this amount to calculate our ROI because it could be invested elsewhere.
   • If we did not continue to live in our house until we closed our old house (we expected about 1.5-2 months), we would have little time to give our companies notice OR would need to rent additional space to live in. In the spirit of wanting to keep costs low, we did not seriously consider renting temporary space after selling our house. We wanted to give our companies a couple months notice so that ideally they could have time to work out a plan such that we could keep our jobs. This would provide some soothing financial security during the transition. The above plan of partially moving our belongings, then continuing to in our old home as we listed and closed, allowed us to move in increments (in an agile manner, if I may) and gave us more time to work things out with our companies.

We were contemplating selling our home ourselves. But we decided that the value realtors provide is a broad market reach, and for us to achieve similar marketing would be a lot of work. Our home has not been sold yet. This article will be updated if necessary with additional thoughts after the sale.

Meanwhile, here are some lessons learned to date:

• While searching for home, also research the title companies you’d like to work with. We didn’t research and then when we wrote our offer, scrambled. In the end, we trusted our realtor and stuck with the title company he recommended.
• Take time to find home buying & selling realtors who will really work for you. Being trusting people, we ended up not working with the original buying agent we found because we were not confident he was working in our interest.