Orchids and sunsets- some favorite blog topics

Which makes it all the more important that we now have Puerto Rico in our pockets ready to go. It’s something that is completely different from our usual routine. It is uncomfortable. We don’t know what to expect. We are excited. It is definitely not just rinse and repeat- at least not yet.

Of course coming home from Puerto Rico to our “normal” here in Greeley is nice. I love my warm showers with strong water pressure and the cool air when I walk out of the bathroom. I love how courteous Colorado drivers are. I love how long and straight and virtually traffic-less our roads are. I love how quiet it can be. I love the pastel more subtle beauty here. Especially in the summer when everything wakes up to life for a few months. I love speaking English and knowing exactly the nuance and slang of what someone else says to me. I even (sometimes) love our winter nights curled on the couch with our fireplace on watching a movie with a cup of hot cocoa or chili in my hands. The numbing comfort and sterility of it all…

But BAM! I want to experience life! And sometimes to really awaken to that, sometimes you have to do the exact opposite of what you are used to. You have to get a little dirty. You have to be a little uncomfortable at first. So I want to see what it’s like to take cool showers and walk into warm air! I want to see what it’s like to drive however you damn well please as if you were walking around a crowded mall. I want to hear the bugs and frogs and birds who are happy to be living outside year round. I want to see in-your-face, loud colors. All year round! I want to become so fluent at Spanish again that I dream in it. That I learn the Puerto Rican slang. I want to know what it’s like to never be cold.

I think it’s important that people get out there and try. Yah, you might fail. You might initially regret it. You might feel scared, insecure or not confident. But I think dreaming big (or even little) is part of what life is all about. Once you have your basic needs met -like food, water, shelter, love and companionship- I think dreams are just as important. They keep you going; they keep you striving to get better. If a tree didn’t seek new heights, was it a tree? And even if we fall, even in failure we learn! Maybe even more so! We learn every step of the way.

Sometimes I think my ideas and dreams are too big for my reality. Like when you are so hungry at an all-you-can-eat place that you fill your plate to the brim only to realize your stomach is just not big enough to hold it all. Britton and I are a good complement to each other in that way. Sometimes he is the brakes to my otherwise overfull plate of crazy “Lucy you have some ‘splainin to do” half cooked ideas, and other times he’s all in with me -as hungry for life as ever. He helps me moderate our risks, and I help him to be less afraid.

In the end, this is all a journey to writing our own story. The conflicts in the story are what makes it interesting! We have to remember that as we go along. It is never so bad that we can’t start again. Even in losing my dad I think I have gained a better understanding of this. Death is there to teach us how to live! To help us remember we are only in this form for so long. So if you feel a calling to something -to your dreams- however weird they are- go for it! It may change or evolve over time, but that’s just as well in a good story.

And of course we do need a little of the normalcy to balance us out just as I need Britton and he needs me.  And that is what these calm Colorado days are all about. Just remember to get a little dirty every now and then before you go back to rinse and repeat.

This is where one decision or choice or desire impacts another and so on and so forth down the line like a ripple. It’s where Karma and Coincidence meet. Much of these we can’t see too far off in the distance, but we might understand them to be occuring even if we can’t see them. Like the idea of six degrees of separation, or that Kevin Bacon game, or It’s a Wonderful Life -how many people could we track back to us? How many people and things have we impacted? What is our butterfly effect?

Britton and I often talk about the fact that on his and my Dad’s shared birthday when we were just little kids, we were probably in the same restaurant at the same time. Who knows why, but usually you are exactly where you need to be, right now.

Lately, Britton and I have been having all sorts of good signs coming our way. The rental being rented the same day -practically the same moment- it was vacated. The application being turned in just as we were walking out the door to walk Schnoodle. (We even joked that we should go on a walk just to have it happen sooner. ) The citrus trees arriving just as we were about to call the plant company to make sure they’d get there. (I’ll have to write about these new trees!)  That we have managed to arrange JUST enough money to cover buying the place in Rincon. That we have been having the most awesome vivid dreams of living in Puerto Rico. That we have had some advertising interest on our websites. That we have already had about three people who want to rent the place in Rincon from us! That we stumbled upon a really inexpensive management company for our properties here in Colorado.

The more credence we give to these “signs”, the more we seem to receive. We even get signs when we are doing the wrong thing. For example: We had to make some minor repairs in the walls of the rental after the previous tenants gouged them moving the couch out. We patched it and painted it. The color wasn’t quite right. Being perfectionists, we tried to get a closer color. Still not right. Then we found a paint chip for the hardware store to try and match. The person behind the counter had us wait around for like 20 minutes then disappeared. Someone else finally came to help, but the computer gave an error that it couldn’t read it. He tried about 5 more times. We thought, well we could go to the next store and try again. Just at that moment, the paint clerk accidently drops the paint chip into a dark void beneath the counter, never to be seen again. Britton then exclamed “Okay, universe, we got the message. We don’t need to worry about the paint.” 

I think since we are nearing our goal and after working so hard and struggling to get here, we are finally given some slack. Maybe it’s my dad watching out for us. Maybe we’re just being silly and reading into things that aren’t there. But I don’t think it hurts to hope and feel the magic. We never know what’s going on just under the surface. Who knows what might be in the works for us, if we just let it and ask for it. So, we thank you, our Lucky Stars, Dad, Karma, Determination, Serendipity and anything else we don’t quite fully understand! And we thank all the people whose lives have intersected with ours for the better good. We do appreciate it and look forward to more in the future unknown.

We have a rental that we were anticipating would become vacant soon as we mentioned before. Well, we did receive notice that he will indeed vacate by the end of April. This leads us to a few choices. The most obvious being, should we rent it out again or sell it?

There are pros and cons either way. This house was our first rental property and we bought it with a mortgage. Currently, the mortgage slightly exceeds the amount we get in rent…what they call an alligator. All of our other rentals are cash flowing.

We do have a fair amount of equity built in it, that would be useful in our new endeavors in Puerto Rico. Renting it out would be easier and we could continue to sock away equity with each rental payment…but are we up for that again? We are kind of in the mind set that we would like to tie up the loose ends here in Colorado slowly so that we can transition to Puerto Rico. But in order to make a big decision it’s good to make a pros and cons list.

Pros of Selling
We would get rid of the alligator in our bunch of rentals
We would net some money from selling which would help replenish us after spending a bunch in PR
We would have one less thing to worry about in Colorado once we do move
We will be selling in spring/summer which is a better time to sell/more buyers

Cons of Selling
Still a down “buyers” market
We’d be lucky to get what we paid for it
We will have to pay a pretty high mortgage (relative) without income until it sells
After commissions are paid out we will have put more money in than we get out (even though we’ll walk away with money in our pockets -still capital losses)
We’ve never sold a house before so it’s uncomfortable
May need to finish the basement to help it sell (which means more $$ and time that we don’t have)

It would be nice to stop feeding the alligator

Pros of Renting
It’s pretty easy; we know what we’re doing
The rental market is pretty strong
Have had some initial interest already
We could increase the rent slightly to make it cover the mortgage and stop feeding the alligator
We can improve the language of the lease
We would be able to pay down the mortgage more so that when we do sell, we’ll walk away with more
People like to move in the spring/summer time -more interest =better rent
Could wait a little while longer for the housing market recovery

Cons of Renting
Another thing to take care of/worry about
Will need to save longer to be able to move to PR with a large enough savings
Lots of unknowns about new renters
Not much wiggle room for errors or expenses (so close to the mortgage cost)

We initially bought this house with the intention of paying it off completely. That’s why we got a 15 year mortgage and why the payments are so high comparatively. When the housing market tanked we were able to afford those other houses more easily and so it made sense to put our money into those instead of this one. I think that was a smart move, but it still leaves us with this house that is not paid for. I personally think it would be a burden off our shoulders and we could start building cabanas that could be rented out in Puerto Rico instead. A sort of slow shifting of resources from here to there. On the other hand, we could get it rented out pretty quick. Set it and forget it.

I’m not sure. If you were in our shoes, what decision do you think you’d make? We are going to meet with a Realtor this weekend to see what she thinks we might be able to ask price wise. That will also help us to determine our decision…

(For illustration only. Not one of our properties)

Really, being a property manager (I like that term better than “landlord”) is like any other job with ups and downs. The only difference is that in this job, our business is the keeping of homes and so when someone’s home life gets chaotic, it affects us as well. So to be an effective landlord/property manager, we have to have a very stable and financially secure home life ourselves.

Our home life is sort of  the foundation for all the others. If we couldn’t manage our home life, how would we pay our mortgage? And if we couldn’t pay our mortgage, you can bet that the other rental mortgages, insurance, taxes, repairs, etc would be the last to be taken care of. Therefore it would create an unstable home life for the tenants residing in the properties. So we take on a great deal of responsibility and obligation to maintain not only our home, but the homes of all of these people who in a contractual way rely on us as much as we rely on them.

And so, it saddens us when we hear that one of our rentals -our first!- will more than likely be vacated soon. It’s too bad because they’ve not only been great tenants, but are also our friends.  And for that reason we’d rather they stay. They’ve lived there going on 4 years! But sometimes, that’s not up to us. No matter how stable and settled our home life is, we can’t make everyone’s that way.

We’ve been thinking about whether we want to sell the property or rent it out again. Because it was our first, it was also our most expensive. When we bought it, it was in move-in condition. Which was great to get our feet wet in the whole rental business, but not so great for the cost because the mortgage is more than we get in rent. So, especially as we are trying to save up for Puerto Rico, this is not very good timing when our basement apartment will be empty, too.

So we feel a little less stable than usual. A little bit edgy. A little anxious. But, you know what? We will be ok, no matter what. We always are. We have our great paying jobs, we have substantial savings and we’ve never had trouble renting any of our properties within just a couple of days of posting them. What I’ve learned in life is that even the weirdest most obviously “bad” things can actually be seen as an opportunity if you let them. We built this foundation strong after all. It can handle a few good shakes.

The other factor is that Britton just got a big promotion at work, and the fact that my work, while the funding is never stable, seems to keep on a-going. So this definitely good news. Britton is pretty excited about learning his new role, not to mention the larger paycheck and it is always hard to turn away from a good job. But it is sort of bad news because it makes it harder to move on…Britton calls it our graduation from Greeley life.

So we are just kind of stuck. We’ve been looking at properties online and have found a couple that we like again. A similar pattern seems to emerge. We like both the quaint -and cheap!- country-side fincas (farms) but we also like the ocean-view villa types where we could rent out rooms and be closer to people.

A serious consideration -a house with 11 acres

After Awilda’s deal went south and another property we had been seriously considering was sold, it put a damper on some of our plans. After all, it is a lot of effort to start over: search out places online with multiple realtors and multiple web sites, fly down there, figure out a time to meet with each of these realtors, negotiate a deal, sign a contract, find a bank, handle all the paperwork from 3,000 miles away since you HAVE to deal with a Puerto Rican bank (for some reason U.S. banks don’t deal with PR eventhough it is part of the US…), then -and this is the part we have yet to do- fly back down to close on the property.

And then what? Do we wait a few months and move there permanently? Do we just live two lives here and there (like snow birds)? Will we have enough income from our properties or should we also do job hunting? All of these questions get exhausting. 

We really want to get there…but there are so many things to consider. So we’ve just slowed down. We are taking it easy. We just continue to save money, as that always makes doing whatever you do a little easier to transition. If it comes quickly, it comes. If not we are not going to force it right away. We will get there one way or another, some time or another. The hardest thing of all is to be patient. Especially for me.

“The fresh eggs from the recalled firms are being diverted to USDA-approved facilities for pasteurization,” Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Patricia El-Hinnawy said Wednesday.

Well honestly, that is about the expected result.  Instead of fixing the problem (large scale centralized food production) we come up with another quick fix.

I just find it amusing (especially after raising a few hens in our backyard) that there is all this hoorah about some eggs.  People really should just take matters into their own hands and raise a few themselves.  But as we’ve seen, the government does NOT want that. 

I mean just think.  People could be responsible for themselves and there wouldn’t be a need for a .gov agency to oversee EVERY single egg this country produces and consumes.  It really is laughable the lengths we Americans go to in order to feel safe.

Show me your papers

Unfortunately for us, this year we won’t be attending. You see, the Greeley Stampede is going to charge an entrance fee for the first time ever in its 80 or so years! Now, if we get free tickets to an event  again or for some other strange reason happen to end up there, I’m sure we’ll be happy to go, but otherwise, we won’t be in their count.

Because we ride our bikes there, do a lap or two around the midway, maybe grab a fattening snack and then ride back. We are not going to spend $10 for that ($5/person) just to walk (bike) in. Maybe others will, I don’t know. But for most people with families of 4 or 5 people who don’t ride their bikes there, just getting in the doors will likely cost $30-40 bucks -just for parking and admission. Then they will have to decide whether or not they want to buy any $5 corn dogs or $6 lemonades. Probably not so much. For a humorous look at this, check out this funny editorial column in the Greeley Tribune.

And I understand that the Stampede is a victim of this wacked out economy just like everyone else…but this is definitely a discretionary item, a fun thing, not a necessity. It is a community event, why not allow the community to come in? It seems to me to be excluding a lot of people to a public park. Would you walk around a park if you had to pay $5 to get in? That’s basically what it comes down to. A big, busy park.

And if you are going to the concerts, rodeos or have a full pass to the carnival, you don’t have to pay to get in…so it really is just attacking people who would be utilizing the park as it was meant to be used…as a public gathering place. You know, like back in the old days when it was meant to celebrate the potato farmers… But instead they are going to erect a fence to keep people out, instead of trying to invite them in…Sounds familiar as Greeley is known for its fences.

And for budgeting purposes, they had other options -for instance they could have charged more for parking…then people who car-pooled or biked like us would be given the motivation to do so. And people who lived in the neighborhood would feel a sense of pride for living there (that they don’t usually feel) because they could walk. They could have tacked on higher charges to vendors and sponsors. They could have charged the fee but then given a coupon for one item of 1/2 price food or drink at the vendors. This would have encouraged people to still spend money with the food vendors and at least made the entrance fee worth something other than just getting in to walk around. Or they could have just scaled back!

It just seems strange that you would want to discourage people from coming out to this event -because that’s exactly what they are doing with this walk-around entrance fee.

But we’ll see. It’s their party, they can charge if they want to. In the end, the proof of this little experiement will be in the pudding. Maybe they will have higher numbers of attendance and make more money than ever before…Some people don’t care too much what kind of value they get for their dollars. But we do, so we won’t be there.  Maybe we’ll ride our bikes to another park one of those evenings.