Yeah! Got an offer on the house and a verbal agreement (signing the contract tomorrow). I bought the house for $87,000 two years ago. The final offer that we have verbally agreed on is $88,400, but I am paying up to $4000 on their closing costs. After everything else, (RE agent fee, document processing crap, etc) I'll get about $12,000 plus some back from the escrow.

When I sold my Texas house, I got $23,700 equity out of it. I paid off some credit cards and loans that I had used to fix up that house and had $17,500 left to put towards the second mortgage on this house. That paid off the second mortgage the month after I got that loan. I've been paying on the first mortgage for two years now.

A little disappointed with only walking away with $12,000. And that is if he doesn't ask for any repairs on the house...well, $200 in repairs is figured in on that amount. But if anything is wrong, I doubt $200 will fix much of anything.

We are supposed to close September 4. We now have to figure out how much of this stuff will fit in the up north house and how much we're going to have to get rid of (or how much stuff up north we will have to get rid of).

$9900 is earmarked for the land payment in December. So, $2000 to help pay some bills right away, plus the escrow back from the mortgage company.

Also, I'll be getting rid of the following budget items per month:
$750 mortgage payment
$100 phone/internet
$150 natural gas
$050 electricity
$075 home owner's insurance
$050 water/sewer/trash
----
$1175 per month

The first few months without this payment will be paying down credit card and line of credit (since the wheat hailed out, I haven't been able to pay off the credit card. That is the first thing to tackle. Then the line of credit - $3000 on it right now.)

I'll be adding $100 per month to my budget for "rent" to a friend of mine at work. She is going to rent me a room for the three nights I am down here for $25 a week.

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Had a tough time with the cows this weekend. It rained a LOT this weekend (my parents 6 miles south of us had 5" on Friday night) and some of the ditches became rivers. It took out some fences, so we were out trying to fix up a fence that would keep them off the road, but because the ground was so soggy, we couldn't put any posts in the ground. Finally got that set of cows so they wouldn't bother that corner, and went to check another set. 18 pairs plus the bull were gone! Finally found them over 2 miles away, so DH chased them on foot while I was in the pickup. The bull wasn't with the cows, but we found him in another guy's pasture just to the south of us. Couldn't get him in on foot or 4-wheeler (he is BIG...like 4000 lbs!) This picture isn't our bull, but ours is big like this:


Fixed the fence so the cows wouldn't get out again, and called Dad and he brought over two horses the next morning to get him in. After a couple of hours of hard riding, we finally coaxed him out the gate and into our pasture. (I have to say, I'm proud of myself...chasing a bull is not an easy thing to do, and even though Dad was coaching me I did pretty good and we did get it done. Those big boys are used to getting their way, so sometimes you have to leave them alone for a while and try another day if they get too obstinate).

After that, we were putting the 4-wheeler away and DH asked if I wanted to go look at the soybeans with him. Ah, yes, the farm date. Actually, it was nice. Nice to see good beans and nice to be riding around together thinking about our future. I've been seeing the beans by the road and most of them are over knee high, maybe up to mid-thigh high on some of them (I'm 5'6", so mid-thigh high on me, for a reference). The ones he went and took me to see on Saturday were up past my hips! And bean pods all up and down the stalks. AND more flowers indicating that they are going to be getting even taller. Yeah!

Time for a little prayer: Oh, God, please, let us have a good soybean crop this year!

DH says that these beans would probably be ready to cut by the end of September. We have other beans that were planted into the wheat stubble after that disaster of a harvest we had and those won't be ready until the end of October. Hope we keep getting good rain, and then it warms up so the beans and milo can finish maturing!

The rain has been hurting our haying this year. We have lost almost a full month because of the rain. Hard to pay off the equipment when we can't do the work to pay it off. So, cuss the rain for haying, like the rain for crops. Good thing I'm an optimist!