New Home and New Truck

Here's my new truck with the window fixed sitting in front of the new digs.

We meet with the attorney and the sellers today to close our real estate deal on the new house. It's been a bit of a tight rope because we got a relatively good interest rate on our home loan (more on that later) and had to close before September 8th to keep it locked in. We will be in Phoenix on the 8th and are actually leaving tomorrow (September 4th), so today is what it is.

My deferred retirement money couldn't be mailed to me until Friday because I was technically still employed but on vacation until Monday, September 1st (Labor Day). They have to mail it or I can pick it up but there is no other acceptable method of transmittal, and it has to be mailed on the last work day of my career. So we were sort of on edge wondering if the check would be here by yesterday (9/2/08) but it arrived in good shape.

The next issue was the large amount of the check as far as releasing funds, but that, too, seems to be going well. It is now, however, 1:15 PM and we close at 4:00 PM and our banking team assures us that adequate funds will be in our checking account for our down payment in time for me to pick up a cashier's check and still get to the closing on time.

We decided to finance the home for ten years in order to protect ourselves from excessive tax penalties. we were thinking about using deferred retirement money (hadn't been taxed yet) to pay cash for the house but found that taxes would be in the murderous range. So we had the money moved to a "qualified IRA" account and purchased a ten year annuity. the interest and principal from the annuity will more than cover the house payments so the net effect is similar in that we won't have to make house payments from my monthly pension while losing the excessive tax liability because the money will be taxed as we get it (monthly spread out over ten years rather than all at once). This will save us some money so we can eat out once in awhile.