UPDATE 12/17: I did it–I called the realtors and told them I wanted to reverse everything. So far, it looks positive that they still can (the cancellation papers had not quite landed on the escrow desk). Though still *slightly* nervous, I am basically comfortable with my change of mind. I’ve decided that whatever happens…I will deal with it. More on this later, after I’ve dug myself out of a massive heap of unanswered email a bit.

Oh…and do give a ring if you know any old people that need a place to live.

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In our entire twelve years of life together, I never seen my husband so tormented. Yesterday I finally dug up my old semi-expired Xanax pills and he got some sleep for the first time in almost two weeks. This torment is the result of a real estate project that was six-months in the making. We were set to buy a mobile home not far from here, rent it out, and sell it for a modest profit in five to seven years from now. We got the loan, the foundation was put underneath the home (as is now required), and everything seemed to be moving forward. My mother was even loaning us the downpayment. The trouble is, I was never very optimistic about the idea, and my sense of doom just got worse the further along we got. Just looking at it on a very basic level, it didn’t look like a bad investment at all: you were getting the land with the thing, which everybody knows only goes up in California, and you could probably make $50 or $60k profit in the end of five years simply by holding on to it. Can’t lose, right? But if you look at the details of our situation as potential landlords, it really didn’t look so good to me. The bothersome details were many:

1) We have an assload of debt. I’ve been afraid to publicly admit how much, but let’s just say it’s a LOT. Most of it is in our second-mortgage, and some of it, maybe 1/5th, is in credit cards. Obviously, we really cannot afford to take on any more debt in any form.

2) Given that we’re only about $3,000 away from our limit on the second-mortgage loan, where, exactly, would the money come from for doing repairs and appliance replacements on this place? (Rentals, we learned, can eat up to $2,000 - $5,000 a year just on maintenance crap).

This one reeked of cigarettes

3) The husband is 200 miles away half the time during the regular semester. Which actually means whatever came up would be…my problem, while I am dealing with two preschoolers alone.

4) It was in a senior park, which means we would be limited to renting to 55 and over, no exceptions. Bruce put out several ads in the various papers, and 75% of the handful of calls we got were people that apparently cannot read “55 and over.” It’s one thing to prefer older people for renters, and it’s another thing to have it as an absolute requirement–which limits your renting pool severely. This made me nervous also.

5) Again, going back to the $3,000 or so we have left to play with before we hit the limit on our loan, how much of a vacancy hit could be take before we got in trouble? A few months, not much more.

This is not the one we were set to buy, but it took a while to find ones that didn’t have a view like this. We didn’t find the titles of ’slumlords’ particularly appealing

6) The mobile home itself was as old as I am, and only a single-wide. While the land value would certainly go up, I was concerned about the value of the mobile home itself going down, and mitigating the benefits of the former.

7) Psycho-tenants, bankruptcy, foreclosure. Very, very unlikely, but…possible.

8) My mother was giving us the downpayment, and was going to take 1/3 of the final selling price. This was fine, but something about getting involved in high-finance with relatives, particularly relatives I just barely patched up relationships with, makes me a wee bit nervous.

This guy did his best to dispel mobile-home living stereotypes, yo

9) The rent we could charge would just barely cover the mortgage on the thing, and actually, for the first two years or so, it sort of wouldn’t and we’d have to make up the difference of several hundred dollars a month. While I don’t think this alone would break us, all it would take is one catastrophic event for big trouble.

10) The bank would only give us a variable interest rate for the mobile home. This means it could go in any direction, but probably up. We weren’t even looking to make a profit while renting it out, but a too-high interest rate could make it hard to even break even.

11) And finally, the uneasy sense that Bruce was so attached to this deal that he was going to find a way to do it without me, whether I liked it or not. This bothered me a lot, and would probably give any spouse negative feelings about a project.

While 1 through 10 are worst-case scenarios, it seems to me if you’re going to pony up $180,000 of your life, you have to consider them. Reassurances that financial shortfalls could be solved by dipping into retirement accounts did NOT persuade me. We did nothing but argue almost every night about this for months. Finally I began to withdraw completely, which I think he took to mean I was warming up to the idea. (I wasn’t). To make a long-story short, he removed the contingencies on the deal about two weeks ago…and backing out after that point means the loss of about $3,000. After one particularly spectacular argument and a bit of buyers-jitters himself, he agreed that real-estate deals probably aren’t worth a divorce. We signed the papers canceling everything yesterday and kissed $3,000 goodbye.

I didn’t fully grasp how much he had emotionally invested in the whole prospect, though. Ever since then he’s been a nervous wreck, torn between two versions of hell–that if he went forward, he’d lose his family’s happiness (with just a slight chance of financial ruin, too!) but gaining a possible $50,000 that could pay off all of our financial problems in one fell swoop–vs. the not doing it, gaining his wife’s trust and happiness and no more fighting in front of small children, but losing out on THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY. Our LAST HOPE. He truly is in hell and I don’t know how to help him.

Last night I had a dream that we were walking down the street in Santa Cruz. We were both going in the same direction, but he was walking on one side of the street, and I was walking on the other. The symbolism couldn’t be more obvious. Part of me wants to call up the realtors and tell them to rip the cancellation contract up, just so he will be himself again. Who knows…I might. We’re still getting a slight trickle of phone calls from the ads he placed, and every time we get one it’s like a knife twisting in his chest. He genuinely feels like this thing could work, and we would not wind up homeless. I dunno–we do it his way, and I get interstitial cystitis from stress, or we do it my way, and he never sleeps again. This is apparently one of those situations where nobody wins.

If there is any shred of a silver lining in this, now he understands sleep-deprivation a little better, and the difference between a swig of Nyquil and prescription pills.