The Adventures of Government Girl and Bubble Boy

Hello! How’s life in 2011? What a random number for a year. It doesn’t really lend it self to anything interesting, does it? Oh no! Is your computer Y2KXI compatible? Dsh dsh dsh dsh I got my first real six-string…. In the summer of 2011! Eh. Oh well! Hopefully it will still be a year of continued good times, new opportunities and of course peace, joy and happiness.

What the heck have we been up to since we kayaked ourselves crazy in Victoria? Not much, to tell the truth! Basically, since the end of August it seemed like just one, long countdown to Christmas. No birthdays, no anniversaries, no vacations. We are so lame! We even took a 4 or 5 day stretch off work around Remembrance Day, but what did we do? Nuscsht!

Why, might you ask, are we two young, beautiful, childless go-getters being so boring as to not even warrant a blog entry since the summer? Well, looking back on it now, it appears the reason for our lacklustre lives these past few months would be what I have started calling our “real estate bubble”. As in, we started thinking about buying real estate one point in the fall, and all of a sudden we found ourselves inundated with viewings, agents, banks, approvals, prices, interest rates, mortgages, budgets and all those crazy, crazy things that go along with buying a home. It was actually pretty fun all things considered, but eventually it also started to seem like every single conversation we had was about real estate and every single fun thing we thought about doing and every single fun place we thought about going was pre-empted by constant budgeting and hunting and plotting and scheming! We were trapped in a bubble!

Sure enough, though, after a couple months of this bubble-life, we had about 10 or so viewings under our belts and we’d narrowed it down to one place in a solid building in a super neighbourhood, close to the beach and UBC with a little bit of a view. We went over our budget a few more times, we sat down with the mortgage broker and then with our agent and put together a really good offer! (Now the story is going to get a little complicated, so bear with me…) Our next steps were: submit the offer, get it accepted and hand over a 5% deposit. This deposit was needed to finalize the deal because we wouldn’t take possession until February 1st. The reason we had to wait was because there were tenants in the suite and the owners are required to give them 2 months notice to move out. It wasn’t a problem for anyone, really. We were just supposed to get our deposit back in February and put it towards our mortgage down payment. No prob, Bob!

Well.

After writing up and signing our offer with the real estate agent, we started talking about the actual mortgage, for which we’d already been pre-approved. And well, you see, our agent kind of likes to tell other peoples’ horror stories. It’s not a bad thing, really, and she’s pretty fun to listen to. Her stories actually made us wary of a lot of important things like construction flaws to look out for and other financial loopholes. Naturally, one such story was about a deposit situation like ours. Some guy makes an offer, gets a mortgage approved and makes a deposit on a place. Then, a few weeks before possession he happens to get a new job. Good for him, right? Wrong. Come mortgage date, some low-level paper pusher at the bank goes and denies the mortgage, saying that the approval is voided due to the "change in his employment situation." No mortgage for you and thank you for the 20k deposit!

Now, apparently after a few headaches this guy got things sorted out, but it really got me thinking about my own employment. Hmmm. Thanks to our ever-fluctuating budget, the government doesn’t give young whippersnappers like me actual full time jobs until we’ve been working there for 3 whole years (at which point the union forces them to do it). Instead, what we get are little contracts that get renewed every 3-6 months. As (un)luck would have it, my group's contract was expiring on December 31st of this year, a mere 4 weeks away, and nobody was bothering to tell us if we’d still be employed in January. I mean, they were already giving us our work schedules for the new year, planning meetings, assigning us tasks and everything! It was pretty clear that we’d still be employed. Heck, they were even hiring new people and scheduling me to train them! But did I have an actual new contract of employment for 2011 to show the bank? Nope. Was anybody in management going to do me a little favour and write up my contract before anyone else’s, just so I could put an offer on a condo whose price was just reduced and is probably going to be snatched up by someone else by the end of the weekend? Yeah, right.

And that’s about when our bubble burst.

In the end, we didn’t submit the offer, another one was made by someone else and we said goodbye condo. It probably would have been just fine, which is easier to say now than at the time. We really could have just put in the offer, paid the deposit, my contract would get renewed a week later (which it did) and the bank just hands over our mortgage in February without even batting an eye! Really, the chances of anything going awry were pretty slim. At the same time, though, being on a government contract really can be that unpredictable, as some of my friends found out last spring. What it came down to in the end, was that there was a hint of a chance that umpteen thousand hard-earned dollars could just disappear and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. The right decision just seemed to play it safe.

Disappointed? Sure. But to our surprise what we felt more than anything was relief! I don’t want to say that we weren’t ready for it. We are going to be awesome homeowners. At the same time, we also suddenly felt for the first time in months that we were allowed to have fun! We suddenly felt great about planning a vacation next summer, going back to school, flying out to see family more often, buying a car or getting the whole wedding thing off the ground. I’m sure we’ll buy a place eventually (and who knows when the right place is going to pop up) but we’ve decided to take a break from the serious real estate shopping right now. It would certainly be nicer for me to have a permanent contract, but also to afford something bigger than a 1-bedroom, or even just have jobs that we actually like while forking half our pay over to the bank for the next 30 years. Ah, dreams.

Not long after the calamitous condo controversy did we (literally) leave it all behind, by hopping on a plane to Florida for the holidays. Chris had a few extra vacation days, so he took off about a week earlier than I did, which was just fine by me because I took full advantage of having the house to myself for a while! Oh, what’s that? You don’t like to turn on the bathroom light in the morning? You don’t like cheese sauce on your pasta? You don’t want to watch Come Dine With Me on the W Network? Awww, too bad cuz you’re 5,000 miles away!

Soon enough, though, having survived a few various rowdy and not-so-rowdy Christmas parties throughout my Jen-week, I, too, had to put myself on a plane to Florida.

It was a decent trip complete with good, well-timed flights, handsome men picking me up from the airport, lots of rest and tonnes of food. Even though it was pretty cold again this year, there was a lot of sun and even just seeing that shiny yellow ball up there in the sky is enough to make any Vancouverite a little weak in the knees.

That’s all I got for today, but stay tuned for more about my palmy, balmy Christmas in Florida – as soon as a certain handsome brother-in-law sends me the pictures!

Oh, and speaking of pictures, I thought you might be interested in seeing what our almost-condo actually looks like.