Thinking Outside the Box

Over the next several months, Todd and I kept an eye on the homes for rent, but continued to talk about wanting to get into a home of our own.

We discussed how there must be a lot of people in situations like ours--two solid incomes but because I'm a small business owner the bank feels like lending to me is too high a risk.

Todd started investigating creative financing options--learning about everything from the price of taking out a hard money loan (OUTRAGEOUS!) to a once popular, but now little used strategy, called an All Inclusive Trust Deed.  I jumped into the mix and called a local real estate investor and asked him how deals were being done and learned about several other purchasing options.

However, the thing with creative financing options is that not many people are thinking outside the box in real estate.  Agents want their commission that traditionally gets paid when the sale is completed, but with many creative financing deals there is no actual sale or the sale date is pushed out far into the future.  Other agents didn't even want to show a house if conventional financing hadn't already been obtained.

We found that we were on our own if we wanted to make this happen.

As we were doing the research, we were getting closer and closer to when we had to move out of townhouse near the beach. The landlord was unwilling to allow the lease to go month-to-month, so we had a hard move out date. I started getting a bit nervous.