What it is and why I'm here today.
I'll get to the househunting bit in a minute. First I want to talk about my thesis. I took another two days of leave last Thursday and Friday and combining that with my weekend, did some last minute "blank-filling" research then banged out the three chapters of the body and the conclusion. On Sunday, I called my thesis director, Dr. K, so he could clear up some murky waters for me. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned that I would have the last, oh, fifty pages to him the next day. As I had been attempting to get each chapter to him as I completed it, this was a bit of an unexpected overload, and he wasn't happy about it. He mentioned that he had bunches of papers to grade before the end of the semester for his regular classes. This was obviously more than he thought he'd be able to handle. I explained that the organization of each of my chapters depended upon the successful organization of all the others, and that I'd had no choice but to do them as one. Anyhow...I turned it in realizing he may not have time to get to them for a week or maybe two, but as I was flying out to Colorado Springs for ten days to find myself a new home, that was fine with me.
My weekend was filled with furious typing and editing, and as I was determined to finish on schedule (my schedule), I didn't get much sleep. I think I got four hours Sunday night, then was up and tweaking it Monday morning. I went to work, worked through lunch, then left early enough to drop off my draft at school and see the chiropractor. Once home, I cooked dinner and packed furiously, then managed to drift off to sleep around 10pm. I was up again at 3:30 to shower and leave and get to the airport by 4:30, although I learned upon my arrival that the ticket counter doesn't open until 5.
Of course, I want to graduate in May, but since we just began discussing a second reader on Sunday, and the process this needs to take, I began to see that this may not happen. I foresaw this possibility when I interviewed so many months ago and the professors wanted to know how it looked for my graduation. I told them I would be finished with my thesis in time to graduate in May, but could not guarantee that I would graduate until the end of the summer semester, as successful thesis completion involves many people over whose schedules I have no control, but I would do my part. This is precisely what appears to have come to fruition.
Anyway, I hopped on the redeye Tuesday morning and took the usual direct flight from Montgomery to Charlotte to Chicago to Colorado Springs, turning what could have been a three hour flight into an eight hour day. Shelly, a friend of many years, picked me up and immediately called her real estate agent to get the ball rolling. I was tired at the time, but had lots of adrenaline to spare and hadn't had a chance to even look at listings, let alone get an agent, so I was grateful for her assistance. That agent--Sherry Romero--quizzed me about what I thought I wanted, what my plans were, and immediately put together a list of properties that I should take a look at and sent them to my email account. She also hooked me up with her recommended financer, Lisa, who asked me a few personal questions about my finances, cooed happily as lenders do when they find out how debt-free I am, and went off to come up with some recommended financing plans. Shelly and I stopped at a restaurant near the airport with an airport theme--we didn't have a waitress; we had a flight attendant...and we ate in a plane--and had a late lunch. By the time I got to the house, my adrenaline reserves were running low and I was still talking with Sherry and Lisa alternately. I checked some listings, my eyes burning and brain, I think, actually sizzling with the effort at this point, then crashed.
I crashed until about four in the morning, local time, after which I was unable to sleep. I've spent a long time getting up at an ungodly hour to work on the thesis that I'm now unable to sleep past five am at home--and I'm now one hour ahead. So I spent that time reviewing every listing, selecting the ones I wanted to take a closer look at, and narrowed it down to about ten or so. Shelly rolled out at a more reasonable nine am, by which point I was about ready to go back to bed. We showered, grabbed some Schlotski's, and drove around a couple of the neighborhoods I'd selected to see some of the homes. In the course of that, Shelly spotted a few more places for sale that we added to our list.
At 1pm, I met Sherry and received her personal "lending 101" class. This is a service she provides to her clients in order to ensure they understand all of their lending options. I'm going to pause here to say that I'm very impressed with her entire SOP already. Although she's legally allowed to, she doesn't dabble in the lending portion of the transaction at all as she considers this a conflict of interest. Her goal is to ensure she has no shortage of referrals to keep her in business, and to ensure that I come to her when I'm ready to sell my house at a later date. Her goal is to make me so happy I come back to her, and that she gets me into a house that she will have no problem selling later. I trust that, as the entire viewpoint admits to the motivation of self-interest.
Her "lending 101" class goes through the available loans (conventional, FHA, VA) and explains the rules surrounding each. Then it goes through the various loan types, such as fixed and variable interest rates, interest only, ARM and HELOS. There's a complete education on debt-to-income ratio and how lenders determine how much loan you qualify for, how private mortgage insurance works and when it's actually financially wiser to use it, how my credit rating is checked and how to improve it, as well as the bonus: the five steps to building wealth.*
* Make the money, save the money, use other people's money, use other people's expertise, and have a plan and stick to it.
The whole class took 3.5 hours. It was scheduled for 2.5 hours, but I ask a lot of questions. This is stuff I've wanted to understand for years, but it was always a huge, muddled mess. She gives pros and cons of all the options, stressing that your long-term goals will determine the best option. Of course, I've hired her as my buyer's agent. We meet this morning at 9am to see houses. We're meeting at an unoccupied one first so she can teach me how to view it.
Shelly picked me up and we were back at the house around six. I called home and was told to sit down, because Dr. K had called and...are you ready for this?...he'd read and edited my last fifty pages in about four hours' time, and he loves it so much he wants me to publish my work. He's so excited about my thesis that he's sending separate instructions on what I need to do to correct it to meet the second reader for, you know, graduation purposes, and what I'll need to do to it to submit it for publication in a scholarly journal.
Wow. Just...wow. That's quite a coup.
See, I've come to realize that what people discover with their thesis or dissertation work is not necessarily "sexy" and doesn't necessarily find anything. Quite often, months or years of research yields the unassailable conclusion that Theory X cannot be proven or disproven with existing evidence. This does add to the scholarly realm--proof that there is no proof is as important as proof that there is--but it lacks the excitement of stumbling upon some positive contribution to the field. I seem to have stumbled upon such a contribution, and my research is good enough to warrant, in Dr K's opinion, professional review above and beyond my first and second readers.
I've very excited. Plus, it appears that I can afford far more of a house than I plan on buying, so I have more freedom in deciding where I want to live, which makes househunting more fun. It should be a good day.
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