36!

My cell phone said I had a message. This isn't weird or anything. I get almost no cell reception where I work so sometimes my phone doesn't ring and then ten minutes later I have a message.

So I checked my message and it was Scott. He sounded SO HAPPY and said there was AMAZING AWESOME news and to call him NOW.

Cool. I called him and he gave me the awesome news.

However first you need some background information:

When we moved in to this house we signed a rent-to-own agreement. We agreed that at the end of one year we would buy the house for $XXX,000, and every month $400.00 of our rent would go toward the down payment on the home. If for some reason we didn't buy the house for $XXX,000, we would lose that $400.00 a month and also the $1000 deposit we made on the house when we started renting it.

Cool.

So for the last year, we have been saving and preparing ourselves to take out a $XXX,000 mortgage.

Now here's the cool news:

We got the house appraised the other day. The appraisal came back saying the house was actually worth $30,000 less than the $XXX,000 we originally planned for. This wasn't terrible surprising, since the housing market has been so insane this past year and we really didn't know how much the house would appraise for. I'm sure that before the market crashed this past year the house actually WAS worth $XXX,000, but not now.

So we called our landlord, the guy who is selling us the house, and told him. We were expecting him to be really disappointed. After all, he would be getting much less for the house than he hoped. BUT.

Not only was he totally cool about selling it to us for the appraised price, he also said we could keep our original deal and still have the money we put toward equity all year!

So, we saved $30,000 from the house appraising lower than we expected.

We saved $1000 for the security deposit that he's putting toward the payment on the house.

We saved $4,800 for the money that went toward equity each month that he's also putting toward the payment on the house.

So, about $36,000.

So, Scott and I went around all day practically walking on air and saying "We saved 36 grand today!" every five minutes.

So happy day!

This means our bank account won't be as empty as we thought. We'll still have to scrimp a little for a few months, but we're going to be totally fine.

Too bad we'll be zillions of dollars in debt.

Oh well. We've already started making plans for the renovations we want to do on the house. So exciting!