It has been an interesting week around these parts. Marty Sunshine interviewed, twice, for a job out of state. They wanted to fly him out, but Marty declined after a bit of back and forth. The job was a very close, but just not enough, fit for us to uproot our lives.
The entire experience was a bit surreal. Marty has interviewed before and been offered jobs before. This experience though was different. Everything was more intense, as we tried to figure out if this was the right time in our lives to do this. The usual topics, money, relocation, benefits were considered. But surprisingly, it was the day to day questions which I found unnerving. I didn't realize until it was over, that I had walked around with my jaw tight for the past several days. Minor issues, came into play as we threw everything we had on to the pros and cons list. We are six months out of a bankruptcy, just started a real estate brokerage, both of us have 80+ year old fathers, Polly is almost 18 and how does that play into a move? What do we do with the cat? Can he travel on an airplane or by car without loosing his mind (Not really) or is it better for him to be rejected, once again by another owner--us--, and have another new family (that just sounds cruel)?
In the mean-time, because I was as distracted by this, the only significant activity I managed this week was to google everything I could about the area. I now know the home school laws, housing prices and tons more moderately significant facts about the area. Incidentally, in case it comes up in idle conversation, this particular metro area of 600,000 has more than 20 martial arts studios.
Of course, this means very little got done on the real estate front. Actually, the only "real estate" that ended up happening was me asking a couple of agent friends to figure out what I could sell my home for. Jane, bless her, gave me a $134,000 range (we need to work on her pricing skills). But to be fair, my home is custom built and not a tract home, which is significantly harder to price. Ronnie and everyone's frenemy, Zillow, were pretty much in sync with what I was figuring, provided I did a couple of home repairs. If I didn't do anything I could subtract $20,000 from the price--which might have been what happened--though my neighbors would have been livid that I gave my home away. Of course Zillow (which has a bunch of incorrect data about my home), does not account for home repairs, so some buyer seeing my home for sale at an unreasonably low price would have (hopefully) jumped. But now they can just wait.
At any rate, Marty and I need to regroup on his job search. I had initially encouraged him to start looking because he is ready to move on from where he has been for the last 20+ years. I am ready for him to move on too. But I am thinking another year in our current location might be in order if Marty can stand his job just a little bit longer.
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