Yes, I fake it.

And my husband knows ALL about it. In fact, he's completely okay with it and helps me do it once a year.

Get your minds out of the gutter and stop thinking about the word that starts with an "s", ends with an "x" and has an "e" in the middle. We do that twice a year. Jeesch...start thinking about Jesus (he is the reason for the season) and not something, well, that most of us have no time for anymore anyway.

I'm talking about my Christmas tree. It's fake, and I'm probably going to be burned or beaten or whatever by my real-tree-loving friends, but I admit it. In fact, I LOVE MY TREE! Go ahead, hate me for not having a real one. But consider...

• It's environmentally friendly (at least until you throw it away) - no need to harvest a tree!!!
• It always looks perfectly cut. That is, unless you allow your kids to form the fake branches. In that case, it may end up looking like a drunk Johnny Depp and his freakishly long scissorhands got to it.
• There's no need to host a "tree burning party" after Christmas. Think of all the cleaning and unnecessary food preparation that saves you!
• No scratches on the roof of the car! No bungee cords to wrastle with!!! It comes in a box!!! A box you can put in your trunk!!!
• No need to water - again, think of the environment and the tap water you are saving.
• Minimal clean up - no wayward pine needles for you to vacuum up. Of course, there more than likely will be a couple of the wayward plastic/vinyl needles that tend to fall of the tree (especially when your kids "help" with putting it up). BUT, you only vacuum those up ONCE! There's no repeat!
• Great ROI - I'm on year number 11 with this tree. We originally paid about $100 for it. So technically, I'm "getting" a 6-foot tree every year for the bargain price of $9.09. Where can you get a tree THAT cheap and still have it look good?

I know there's more fakers out there...come out of the stocking, or the chimney, or where ever it is you've been hiding (statcounter tells me you ARE there, you just choose to not make yourself known!). Tell me your reasons for faking it and there could be a prize!!!

Goodbye House

Ding-dong the house is gone! The house is gone! Ding-dong the house that wouldn't sell is gone!

It took us TWO AND A HALF YEARS, and we dropped the price about 100k since we originally listed it, but we finally sold it. Now, ordinarily this might not seem like a big deal, BUT, last year, we bought a home that we fell in love with and we have been carrying two houses for well over a year now. Something had to give, and soon.

Just to give you an idea of what we went through to sell, here’s a bit of a background for you. We’ve had SIX contracts on the house that have all fallen apart for the following various, and (sometimes) incredibly ridiculous reasons:

Contract Number One: The buyer is unable to borrow the 80k she apparently needs to buy our house from her dad. She’s one of our neighbors and also has a house to sell. Oh yeah, and she forgot to sign the contract that our agent sent her.

Contract Number Two: The wife of the couple that’s trying to buy our house has a double stroke and slips into a coma two weeks before closing.

Contract Number Three: Buyer’s wife decides she wants a different house three weeks before closing and we end up going to court with them over the good faith deposit (we won).

Contract Number Four: Turns out to be a rather shady dude whose house is in foreclosure and who also tries to win our sympathy by telling us that had he not taken a smoke break when the first plane hit the tower, he would have been a fatality of 9/11. Really now, a much more compelling, yet believable story could have been told like that his wife left him and took everything in the divorce so she could complete her life long dream of herding goats somewhere in the Middle East. THAT would have been more believable to me, especially since I googled the guy and his website CLEARLY states he had his real estate business, HERE in this STATE that we both live in for more than thirteen years. How he could manage to lose every bit of his “business” in New York, but yet still run a “successful” real estate business here, is nothing short of confounding in nature. Needless to say, we walked away from him (perhaps ran would be a better choice) when he requested we do an off-the-books side deal that would get him an additional 15k in cash.

Contract Number Five: The buyers in this instance just couldn’t sell their house and the poor souls gave up trying. We know their pain…more than we care to admit.

Contract Number Six: The buyers love the house and then proceed to ask for enough money to fix EVERY little thing that came up in the home inspection. We ended up dickering, and dickering, and then finally, they got frustrated and walked.

Two months ago, we decided we would pull it off the market for a year and try to rent it out. As it turned out, our renters wanted to buy it. We closed last week.

This is a weight lifted off us like no other. Do you know what this means? Selling this house means we can now afford to buy shoes for the kids and maybe, just maybe some food other than the “five boxes of mac-n-cheese for five dollars” we’ve been feeding them. I’m kidding! It’s been tight, but not THAT tight. Seriously though, what this means is we can move forward on a bunch of projects we’ve been planning. Maybe fatten up our retirement funds a bit more and pay off the cars…who knows? It’s just nice to not have to send that extra check out every month.

On an end note, I don’t recommend at all the carrying of two homes at once unless you’ve either married into money or have a successful prostitution ring on the side that covers one of the mortgages. On the off-chance you don’t have either of those two options available, I strongly recommend waiting…until like, 2010 or so, when the housing slump is “supposed” to be over. Come on now, it’s only another two years…