Houston, We Have Tenants.

I completely spaced on writing about this earlier, but...dun dun dun...OUR INDY HOME WAS LEASED!  Completely with our permission, of course.  It spent March through mid-November on the market with no bites...17 showings...pretty much all positive feedback...but nothing.  Although renting out your place in November is less than ideal as the renting market is at its lowest during that timeframe, we were lucky in that the moment they put it on the market for lease the house got 3 showings and then was almost immediately rented out.  I should say not only was it rented, our tenant signed an 18-month lease!  That means we should have an easier time renting or selling since the lease will be up in May of 2013.

I love that instead of spending money on the mortgage, HOA(s), utilities, and property tax each month, now we are actually covering our costs AND putting money away.  Ahhhhh, it feels nice.  Of course if we could have sold it, we would have.  The whole "buying and owning a home" experience was fine initially, but unfortunately our "selling a home" experience completely trashed any ideas I had about buying a home again in the next 5 years.  At this point I would be completely OK with renting for an indefinite amount of time rather than duplicate our current situation where we have what seems like a bazillion dollars of our own money tied up for what could be forever.

I think it is true what they say about how our generation could quickly become a generation of renters, much like the vast majority of European nations.  Not being able to move when you need to is not going to fly very far...and gone are the days where buying a house was a true foolproof investment.  I won't go so far as to say that I regret purchasing our home in Indy as we ended up paying the cheapest rent EVER and could never have done that without buying, but for now our life doesn't allow us to remain in the same place even if we want to...and so if selling a house is next to impossible right now, we simply can not buy again until that is no longer the case.