Sticker shock

Thanks to all who commented either here or on Facebook yesterday on my hair dilemma. Pretty sure I know what direction I'm going and I feel good about that at least. Got bigger fish to fry now.

I was so worried this whole time about just PASSING the inspection at our house for the refinancing that I didn't even consider another extremely huge important detail - the dollar amount of which it was valued had to hit a certain point for the loan to be approved by the bank.

Well, we passed with flying colors - the house is in the average to good condition category so that part is definitely not a problem. They gave us bonus points for the new furnace/air conditioner and the fresh paint jobs.

But it's not enough. The value of our house has dropped a shocking 50,000 from our original appraisal 4 1/2 years ago and 30,000 from what we purchased it for originally. And sadly, that is not good enough for the bank unless we want to drop an extreme amount of change at closing - which we are not equipped to do.

I'm not so naive to say that I don't see that home values have been dropping all over - that is why houses are selling for so cheap right now - I totally get that. I just assumed with some of the improvements we made we'd be in somewhat ok shape here. And the county's estimate of our value is more what we thought it would/should be. But apparently, that's not what the appraiser thinks.

Our lender is looking into one last ditch effort with our current bank, but it's likely that we're out right now. And we'll be ok - it's not like we aren't making our payments right now or anything like that. But it's very disheartening after seeing what the numbers could be and the amount of work we just put into the last week or so.

I wish this was a nightmare I could just wake up from but sadly, it is what it is. And it's things like this that sometimes make me wish I was just a kid playing house.