Turbo tax

An Upgrade: Turbo Tax Premier

As of October 1, 2009, we will be landlords. (Wow, I never wanted to be able to say that!) We signed a lease for our house on Monday.

It all happened very fast. Last Tuesday, I got a call out of the blue from a man asking if we would be willing to rent our house. Every time that has happened (more often than I would have expected), we have said a very quick and flat-out "no". This time, we had just been wrestling with a second request for a land contract, from a different family, and really felt uncomfortable with the whole idea. We are feeling desperate, but perhaps not THAT desperate. The people asking for the land contract wanted a 3 year term, and we just felt we couldn't commit to 3 years. The very same day we were leaning toward telling our agent "no", I got this call about renting.

The family is from Alabama, and is coming to Ohio for a 2.5 year missionary apprenticeship airplane engine maintenance program offered in our town. They have three boys, and home school. They were grasping at straws in our town for a decent house to rent that was big enough for their family and not in a slummy part of town (where most of the rentals are in the town where our house is). For the first time I started thinking "maybe we should do it"; I called Andrew and for the first time he was also open to the idea.

We met them last Wednesday to show them the house and talk about what the terms would be. We wanted to leave the house on the market if we rented, and thought they were ok with that as well. As it turns out, that was somehow a miscommunication/misunderstanding between us, and they were not comfortable with that after all. We changed the terms of the agreement from 12 months to 6, took our house off the market for the next 6 months, and signed the lease agreement on Monday. I feel a certain sense of relief because I am SO tired of going to our old house. I dread it every time we have to go do yard work, and I hated to even think about having...

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