Our First Major Fiscal Mistake

I’ve kind of been debating on whether or not to write this post. I don’t want to come across as some rich jerk that screwed up. Nor do I want this to be interpreted as a ‘woe is me, we have no money’ (especially by our friends and family) type of post. [...]

If You Buy A Fridge, I’ll Tax the Ice

We are doing a pretty decent job of staying in budget on our allowances.  All said and done, with windows, plumbing fixtures, doors & appliances, we are only about $4,000 over budget.  Compared to other people we’ve talked with, we are knocking the cover off the ball with this.
Some of this is due to our [...]

Somehow, We’ve Got to Pay For This Project

Wow, that is an ugly image, but you get the idea.  We’ve got our financing lined up now and are going through the document signing process.
I probably called a dozen or so banks during this process and have a very detailed understanding of the types of loan products that are available through all of them.  [...]

Plans Out of the City

Yeaaaaay!!!!
Except it came about 4 weeks early.  We have been kind of caught with our pants down a bit since we don’t have financing lined up yet nor have we finalized on a contractor.  But our plans are ready to be picked up.
Probably this week, we will resolve the above.  We’ve narrowed our contractor down [...]

From Granite to Laminate

Like a lot of people that are in this process, especially in the Silicon Valley Area, we were planning on using money from stock options and equity in our existing home to pay for this project. Unfortunately, Yahoo, my company, missed a quarterly number a couple of weeks ago which sent the stock price tumbling [...]

First Estimate is In

We got our first estimate in today.  It was about 10% lower then our budget is, but didn’t include things like landscaping and permits.  I’ve heard that permits can be as much as 8 - 10% of the value of the project.  Landscaping is probably another 10 - 15% of the cost of the project.  [...]

My Fiscal Disclaimer

Holly and I aren't rich, so I don't want any strange, unknown relatives coming out of the woodwork thinking that we are on easy street and begging for dough.  We have pretty much resigned ourselves that, unless an ultra-wealthy unknown relative kicks it and leaves us all the money or some other financial windfall bestows [...]

Financial Head Check

Once we finally reached a point to where we felt like we knew what we wanted with our house, we started to have contractors come over to help us make sure that what we wanted to do was in our budget range.
We really like the work of both DeMattei and Browne Custom Homes, who recently [...]