In the midst of all the house fixing confusion our cat disappeared sometime Monday night. We have been looking for her and fearing that she might have come to a sad end. Tonight, up in the loft of the rental house, the husband and I were talking when I suddenly heard loud cat yowling. We jumped up and went to the attic door and found our Foxy, rather disoriented, but ready to be rescued.

She had gone exploring during the night and found the doors to the rental house open and beckoning…  The next morning the painter had put the hardware back on the attic door and shut it. We’ve been calling and looking for three days and she never said a word until now!

Q Qualified Buyer

Q for Qualified Buyer is so very important to us as we set out to sell our house. I am not a financial whiz kid but I gather that being “qualified” means that a buyer has some money and has good credit, according to a bank who will lend him the money for a mortgage.  Does that sound simple, and isn’t that what we want? Yes.

I didn’t learn much about being qualified as a buyer when we bought our first house, because we bought that one for $1. That’s a story for another time, in fact I may have already told it somewhere in this blog.

When we bought our second house, the amount that the lender wanted us to put down was about 20% of the price of the house. I think that’s what they would like to see. If you have a good record of paying off credit cards or other borrowed money, the bank may lend the other 80% at whatever interest rate is in fashion at the time. All this takes some talking and filling out forms at the bank or home loan company. They will also want to know things like how long the buyer wants to take to pay the loan back. A buyer can do all this before they even find a house. The bank will tell them how much of a house they can afford, so they can shop in that price range.

When a buyer (or his realtor) comes to us, in the near future, and says “I want to buy your house!”, the next thing we want to hear him say is “Hey, I’m prequalified. Yea!!”

On other property, we have had buyers make offers which we accepted, and then found out later that they were unable to get a mortgage. This is sad because it wastes a lot of time, and you, the seller, are back where you started.

This is very simplistic, I know, but as I said, I am not full of details about the subject. I have to confess, the details bore me, and I can never remember them from one time to another. I’ve only bought 3 houses in my life and they’ve been very far apart.  But, qualified starts with Q and that’s what counts.