Sad

On Friday we stopped by the post office to send a package off to Sister, and we thought to forward our mail to the new house while we were there. Of course they are going to stop delivering to the old house immediately, but it will take 7-10 days to get the mail at the new house. On Saturday we stopped by the old house to do some cleaning and painting and found this.

[rebates] Dlink, Coors

Since this is also a Dollars blog, I thought I would track my rebates here as well...

Dlink 5 port gigabit switch $10
Coors Light $8

Then Coors was a pretty ridiculous deal, 24 pack of cans for 7.99 after the rebate :)

[update: received Coors rebate on 6/8/09]

Begin the Garden

I started the garden about a week ago, just bought some of those degradable starting kits and some seeds. We also used some of the seeds we had left over from yonder years. I just hope they don't get too big before I can plant them outside.

Here is a link to the list of plants that I am hoping to grow: Google Docs.

Up goes the mailbox!

We put the mailbox up Sunday night. It was pretty cold and the ground was hard, but it went up without too much trouble.

The move is just beginning

90% or our "stuff" is now in the new house. It is pretty amazing how much stuff one (or two) acquire in such a short amount of time. Our task now is to separate the wheat from the chaff. We are hoping to empty 1/4 of the boxes to good will / trash/ craigslist, whatever.

As of today, we have the kitchen mostly cleared out and the mudroom down to a couple of boxes. The hardest part for Jen, I think, will be going through her cloths. The hardest part for me will probably be going through the copious boxes of random computers parts that I have collected.

We still have the garage to move over and a few things from the utility room. Oh and I ordered a TV for the family room...

Start the Move

The house is ours as of yesterday. There are still a few things that contractors will be stopping back to finish.

We started moving some stuff last night, and then packed some boxes. We are going to be taking car loads over, unpacking and taking the boxes back to repack. Kind of an involved move process, but it will allow us to sort and put things away as we go.

The cable was installed yesterday, so we have a Comcast phone number now... It was free for 6 months and reduced the install cost, so it would have been foolish to turn it down. Of course now I have to remember to cancel it.

We also bought a "Magic Jack" it is so ridiculously cheap and actually works. We are going to switch our cell phones to pay as you go and then use them like a pager.

I moved our 37" TV over last night to try out the cable. The TV doesn't have a tuner though, so I brought over my computer to use the tuner in that. Unfortunately, I ran an hdmi cable in the wall and thought I had a hdmi to dvi adapter (the TV doesn't have hdmi only dvi). But it was the opposite "gender". Radio shack wanted $38, and Menards wanted $30 for the correct adapter. I found one on Amazon for $1 plus $3 shipping...

So I thought wouldn't it be nice to have a small local business that stocked cables and adapters for a resonable price...

FYI, I am just going to be patient and order the adapter. I brought a monitor over to hook my computer up to.

ARMS are good...

So we may have an offer on our current house. I say may because it is Rob, and the offer is to "buy" then house but pay rent to us until the buyers current house is sold. However, Rob assured me that he would ask for enough earnest money to pay his fee... We will see how this all works out, Rob said he would get together with them today and get back to us.

We have been meeting with another Realtor, and through his analysis he feels we should list the house at $209k. That is a pretty depressing number, since the buyers would still probably ask for a reduction, as well as something towards closing. It is that kind of market. Which leads me to want to rent, but Jen has valid points concerning why that is a bad idea. So hopefully this sale can work out (we would both kinda get what we want).

But as for the title of the post. I called our mortgage broker to see what the rate on the house is going to do in June (it is a 3 year ARM that is 5 years old now). And she told me it will go down to about 3.5%. So I have to say that ARMs are awesome, when the economy is in the tank. (ARM is 2.275 plus 1yr treasury, which is at .68 right now).