For my few loyal readers, you have likely noticed a lack of post here recently. Life has been crazy since the beginning of the year. Here is my rundown of reasons/excuses for not posting:

• We bought a new house in November, so we’ve been trying to get settled in.
• We still had to sell our old house, and to get it ready for sale we had to do some repairs and painting. Managing the contractors we hired to do the work and dealing with other maintenance on the old house took a good chunk of time, especially since the old house is about 30 miles away from the new one. 
• We elected to sell FSBO using a flat-fee MLS listing service. While we don’t feel we missed much by not using a traditional agent, this did involve some extra work. The $5,000+ we saved in commission by not using a traditional agent to list the home was definitely worth the extra work we had to put it and I’d definitely do it again.
• As alluded to in my last point, we did sell the old house, which did take some time and aggrevation in negotiating repairs and such, plus checking up on the buyers’ agent periodically to make sure they were doing what they needed to complete the transaction.
• We just refinanced the mortgage on the new house. We originally did a 30-year fixed, and with the equity from the sale of the old house and the significantly lower rate we were able to refinance into a great deal on a 15-year fixed with a minimally higher payment.

So all of this along with the demands of a full-time job, family with three small kids, and maintaining a house with a yard just a bit larger than an acre have left little room for posting.

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