I start lots of my blog posts like this. When you’re buying a new home, you dream of living there happily ever after. But, sometimes a house isn’t a blessing, and when that happens, it’s good to know you have options.
The Money Pit
After you’ve lived in a home for a few years – hopefully several years, things start breaking down. Sometimes you have expense, after expense, after expense, and it seems the house is a money pit. You usually can avoid this by maintaining regular home maintenance, but sometimes things just break. If you have equity in your home, you can ask for a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) to help finance these repairs. That’s one solution.
Rental Homes
The passive income offered by rental houses is a nice benefit. But, a rental house an become a burden as well. It can also be a money pit, if several repairs are needed suddenly. And, vacancies can hurt your profit as well, especially if the last renters of the home left the home in disrepair. You always hope the home will be clean with only routine maintenance necessary when a vacancy occurs, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, you decide it’s time to get rid of this rental house.
Family Member Downsizes or Died
These can be hardest of all. When one of your family members dies or downsizes as they move into a nursing or assisted living home, their house and belongings still left for you to handle. It’s not even your house, and this sure isn’t a blessing in every case. Older folks frequently have a lifetime of belongings in their home, while some have even become hoarders in their old age. You don’t even know where to begin in sorting it all out. And, once it’s all cleaned out, their home frequently needs some repairs before it can even be listed. We experienced this situation ourselves in this situation. And, we weren’t local, so we were lucky one of our siblings was local to handle the immediate needs, but that was hard on him handling it alone.
Maybe We Can Help
If you find yourself in one of these situations, we’d love to talk to you. First, sometimes it just helps to talk to someone about what you’re going through. We can be a sympathetic ear, because we’ve been through some of these. And, we frequently can offer a solution, sometimes several solutions, that you can decide if one of them works for you. But, above all, we’ll stop to pray with you and encourage you. Because we all need someone during times like this, that we can just talk the situation through with. We’d be happy to be that person for you.