My wife and I were homeless... twice, well sorta

Reach out to Jess Tiffany https://cardzap.thebumpcard.me

It was probably about 14 years ago. My wife and I lived in an 800sf home in Minneapolis, near the Minnehaha Falls if you are familiar with the area. The city literally cut out our front lawn to put the Light Rail track. So every 7 minutes... Clang! Clang! Clang!

We had some equity, one kid and we thought it was time to buy a bigger home.

Sadly, this is not the happy ending we hoped for. The guy buying the home was some big investor and he wanted to make a quick flip or something. So he was going to buy the home and would not allow us a day or two t move out. The contract said we had to be out on closing day and hand him the keys.

So we did all that, rented a moving truck, had all of our belongings in the moving semi, paid movers to help us, only to get a call that the investor was out of state and we would have to close the following week.

So we had to pay for the moving vehicle for another week, we had no food, no furniture, no television, but we did have a roof over our head.

The week was a horrible waiting game, as the investor kept moving the closing date a day or two at a time. Finally after more than a week of essentially being homeless. We had to pay movers to move us back into the same home again.

Dejected and burnt by this deal we just sat in that home for another year or so before we would look again.

A year or two later we finally got the gumption to try again. We both had higher-paying corporate jobs and felt we could go for it. What we did not expect or know at the time was there was some major corruption in the banking industry just ready to implode.

It was time, we found a beautiful home and were poised to close at the end of the month. All this crazy bank stuff was going on in the background, but we had equity in our home, amazing credit, and even a contingency agreement to sell our home for an OK price.

Within 2 weeks of each other, my wife and I were both laid off from our jobs in different industries. We tried to still go through with buying the home, but the bank did not want to loan us money under those circumstances and three home deals fell through all in one fell swoop. Earnest money was lost and one of the buyers called us, yelling as if we had control of our jobs being taken away or the bank not letting us close on the beautiful home.

So still stuck in our little 800 square foot home for even longer. Finally, the market was decent, so we sold our home and rented for a while. We decided to just put away the equity for when we would finally find a home that would work.

I was still unemployed, was back in college to finish a degree while looking for a job. We also had more kids now and decided just I would work and my wife would home school. During this downtime, I also discovered I could make money publishing books. Which I am still doing to this day.

Finally, after a year, I found a sales job, along with my publishing and we were ready to go again and get that home.

This time we did get a happy ending. The market was way down at this point and we were able to find a lovely foreclosure that was perfect for us.

We had looked at over 200 homes before we finally found "the one for us". After about 2 minutes inside, we looked at each other and both agreed this is it. We had shopped so much we knew exactly what we wanted when we saw it. Not only did we have cash from the previous home to put down on it at over 20%, we also were able to buy the home at close to $100k less than it would have been in a normal market.

So we lost our home... sorta 2x.

However on the second house, after we both lost our jobs, we would have "actually" lost the beautiful house do to forclosure as there was virtually no income for more than a year other than some unemployment benefits for a few months.

In the end our family has been blessed beyond what we could have ever hoped for. We now have 4 amazing children and live in a wonderful neighborhood.

There were dark days, many of them during that time, I cannot discount them. However, we knew that God ultimately is in control, we trusted him, and to be honest, questioned him sometimes, but he did see us through.

Please check out the Rev It Up for business podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/5nRS89RUH1pqdEmQ5w793n