Overwhelmed

I haven't blogged since June and that is so sad to me. I'm not documenting our family life and my children's growth. Mike and I are both extremely busy. Mike's new job, he's still going to school, taking care of the kids, etc. I have my photography business I work hard at growing and I'm gone at photo sessions on the weekend and even some week nights while most other nights I'm editing photos. I'm preparing to teach a photography workshop next weekend. The kids keep me super busy. Mike has now started traveling for work. Then we have little odds and end things like trying to prepare for a garage sale which means sorting through EVERYTHING. To top off my to do list of about 100+ things (literally...I've written it out), we have had to make one of the hardest decisions that we've had to make our whole marriage. We've made the grown up decision to move. While some may think 'really? Moving is the hardest decision you've had to make?' it IS.

We love our ward, we LOVE our house so much, and we love being close to family. THIS is our home. This was our first home as a family. We have so many memories here and I love my house. I love my kitchen and the space and my yard that backs up to a canal. What makes this worse is that when we move, it will be to a tiny little two bedroom apartment. That's totally manageable but to move out of the home we love to a small apartment kind of blows.

We knew when Mike was considering this new job that the drive out to Bedford (an hour commute one way) would be tough financially but when he was offered a little more money than we were expecting we thought everything would be just fine. I do our budget and I pay our bills and when I noticed that things just weren't working for us financially to live this far from work and accomplish our goal of getting out of debt, I told Mike that because we literally had NOTHING we could cut out of our budget (because we had already cut out all entertainment, eating out, grocery 'fluff', etc) that the only things we could change would be gas, tolls, and living expenses and the only way we could do that would be to move closer to work. Well, Mike feels the same way I do about where we live so he kind of dismissed the discussion saying we could make it work and that was that for about another month.

This past weekend we finally found a small window of time (I came home to grab lunch in between photo sessions) and I had the chance to SHOW Mike what I was trying to tell him the previous month. Our budget was NOT working with us living this far from work. He was a little shocked and didn't think it was that bad. That was it. We knew we had to leave. We had to leave being close to family, our friends, our ward, and our home.

We HAVE to go. We have tried and tried to figure out how we can stay but it just doesn't make sense financially. Right now we are facing the hard decision to sell or lease our house. We aren't going to be able to list our house for sale for as much as we were hoping so we probably won't get much (if anything) from the sale if we sold. We are thinking about leasing because our agent has no doubt that we could easily lease and in fact we could make a little extra money every month because of the market we can lease for more than we pay on our mortgage each month. My worries with leasing are bad tenants who miss rent, don't take care of the house, I have to pay to replace things, etc. I've been so wishy washy in deciding because I just don't know. We've prayed about it and we are still unsure. This is a very hard decision for us. I've loved getting input from my dad and my mother-in-law but they've both given us input based on their past experiences and I just don't know if we should make a decision based on those.

I would love to hear any opinions and advice (be nice...I'm not looking for criticism about us) about your experience with either selling your home or renting it. Maybe there is something I'm not realizing.

Our plan is to move to an apartment in the Coppell/Lewisville area for about a year to make sure we like the area and our ward. If we do, we will stay in that area for another few years. If Mike loves his new job and knows he wants to be there as long as possible, we will rent apartments/homes then we will buy a house down there after we pay off our debts and save up a 20% down payment. If for some reason Mike thinks he would like to change jobs (which I HIGHLY doubt because he is LOVING his job) then we will just rent some other homes until Mike finds a new job and we will see where that takes us.

We have a landscaper coming Tuesday to fix up a few things, I will be frantically re-painting, de-junking, and organizing this weekend and then our house will probably be listed starting Wednesday. Listed for sale or lease....I still don't know yet but it will be listed.