Good Bye House

Well, it's official, the house is not ours anymore.
So many feelings.

We lived in that house for 9 years. That's not terribly long, but long enough for me to have some serious moments of "what the hell did I just do?" as we walked away with all of our stuff loaded into a truck, handed over our keys, and signed our names on the dotted lines.
Surprisingly it feels good though. Overwhelming for sure, but really really good.
It might help that we got our share of the funds yesterday after the house closed. I won't lie that also felt really really good, and I loved the look on Shawn's face when I showed him the numbers in our account.

More then anything, this makes me feel like we are really doing this life thing right.
As much as I hate money and all the greed and pain it tends to cause the world, I like knowing that Shawn and I have been smart with ours and what we have made and have been given in this life. We have dreams and goals like anyone else, and again I've noticed that the things in life that are most worth spending time on, are the hardest things to do. Moving out of that house was incredibly painful for a few reasons, mainly my muscles are literally on fire. Still.

A lot of people have given us funny looks when we say we are downsizing. It's not normal. It is a new trend, but I notice that a lot of people are still confused by it. I get the question "Why are you doing that?" a lot. I imagine for most people moving into our town home community it's their first home. If you could afford a larger home, why would you give that up? Truth be told at this point we could afford an even larger home if we wanted to, but that doesn't make any sense to me. For almost as long as we've lived in that home, which I've completely adored, Shawn and I have realized that it was too big for us. But we finished the basement?! I know, that makes no sense, even to me. Let me just be real and honest and say that I've been through a lot and have just not known what I needed to get through the extreme ups and downs I've felt after loosing my mother. I thought I needed space. We had filled up every room, and I wanted a play area for the kids, and an office/studio for myself. It made sense at the time, but then came the hassle of actually getting through the construction of the basement, and then the dawning realization that it didn't fix my problems. Oops. That was kind of a big mistake. We loved the basement for the year that we had it. I loved being able to say "kids, go downstairs!" but we just weren't using the space the way I had intended, and again we came back to "this house is too big for us, and now it's enormous."
For a long while, starting a few years after we got into the house, Shawn would say "This house would be perfect if we cut the yard in half, and didn't have the basement". That sentiment grew on me, and when life kept changing and we realized we really are here to stay in UT for a long while still, it made sense to look for something that fit that image of his.
I'm happy to say that our town home fits that almost exactly.
Square footage wise it's actually the same size as the top half our house if we removed the finished basement. So are we really downsizing? We've already learned to live in that space, it's just laid out differently now, and we no longer have a yard to care for. So that's up for debate I guess. Mentally it feels smaller because it's a town home not a home home.
Also the garage is much smaller. I prided myself for so many years in not being a garage hoarder, but when you have an entire garage that isn't being used... you use it for random shit you don't really need. That was our biggest obstacle during this move, and my biggest relief to no longer have. If you don't have the space to fill, you won't fill it.

Anyway, I'm rambling now.

Here are some numbers if you fancy some details about our move. I'll list it in terms of Big house, Little House.

2008 purchase of Big House: 232,000
Basement finish: 25,000
Final amount owed in 2017: 250,000

Rough estimates.

2017 listing of Big house: 325,000
Sold at: 325,000
Walked away after fees and paying off loan: 47,000

Woohoo! That last number is exciting!

2017 purchase of little house: 220,000
Extras for little house (like granite counter tops etc...): 7,000
Final owed: 225,000 (we put 2,000 down on the extras)

Here's where this get's really great:
We are taking 35,000 and putting it towards Little House. Bringing our loan down to 190,000.
We are also taking our mortgage payment from a 30 year loan, to a 20, maybe a 15, year loan.
I'll be 45 to 50 when we pay off Little House. Assuming we stay that long, and you just never know, life has a tendency to change a lot.

So, does downsizing make more sense now? This is the big pay off, the whole reason we did it. It feels great!

This is why I think we are really rocking this life. I would like to think that I've learned a lot from my families past mistakes while I was growing up. I never want my kids to know the struggles I knew as a kid and teenager trying to start her life, that shit is enough to break a person.
And now the best part is that our future home on a boat is within reach! And maybe even a fun little boat before we get there. :)

Life is pretty exciting right now, for several reasons. Shawn and I have been married for 11 years, and in those 11 years I never would have guessed that we would be looking at this kind of lifestyle. We've seen all kinds of hardships along this path, but it has been more then worth it to dredge through them, and feel like we are finally coming out of the other side of it all. Life is hard, marriage is hard, kids are hard, careers are hard, finding yourself is hard... etc. But we have so much to look forward to and I'm so glad that we've been through it all together so that at the end of it, right here and now, we are closer then ever and have so much to look forward to together and with our kiddos.