House update

We are hopefully in the last few days of just waiting for everything to finish so we can close on our new house.  But in the meantime...

We have a renter!  After some frustration, that part is taken care of.  We had a few different people we know express some interest, but none of them worked out.  Then a new family in our ward wanted to rent from us.  It seemed perfect, but then right when we were about to get them to sign the lease, they found out that they can keep staying where they are (rent free) until June.  So that wasn't going to work.  After exhausting our avenues amongst the people we know, we decided to put it on craigslist and give that a try.  I had someone contact me about 12 hours later.  (Then someone else the next day, and another person a few days after that.)  It's nice to know that it looks like it shouldn't be hard to find renters in the future.  I think the fact that it is a smaller house has something to do with it.  Almost all of the houses for rent in this area are large, and more expensive.

We went with the first person who contacted us.  She is a single person, my age, non smoker, no pets, and no children living with her.  She will be working full time at a hospital and I think going to school too.  She seems like the ideal renter.  We have a signed year lease, a security deposit, and the first month's (April) rent, plus a few days of prorated rent fot the end of March.  I'm feeling much happier knowing all that is taken care of and we won't have double mortgage payments to make.  We are actually making money from renting our house, although we plan to set it aside to use for maintenance.  It is crazy that we can charge a renter more per month than what we will be paying for our new mortgage.  I guess that is why you buy, especially in the market right now.  (Hooray for our locked in 30 year 3.75%  mortgage rate!  And most of our student loans are at 8%.  Seems so backwards, right?)

Now I maybe should think about putting some stuff in boxes.