Well, it's a new old house. 8-)
A couple of months ago, a repo guy drove up to our place and was looking for an address close to ours, but that we had never heard of. The more we thought about it, the more we realized it must be next door.
It seems the owner of the modular house on the parcel next to ours was defaulting, with just $8000 left owed. We used to know the owner, she has some issues (including drug use) and we figure she flat out didn't have it to save her own house, especially considerig she had stupidly deeded the land under the house to her then-boyfriend.
Just as sad and aggrivating for us was the fact that we couldn't scrape together the $5000 needed to buy it from the repo company and move it the 1 mile up to our land so we would have a new house.
But then I posted my frustration and despair to Daily Kos. And that changed.
Seems some kind soul here took pity on me and decided to loan me the $5000 so we could have a new, bigger place to live.
We have a modest existence, and are close to the bone every month. We make about $22,000 at the moment and grow a lot of our own food and reuse practically everything. We homestead in the mountains of (expensive) California, living on my MIL's land with 7 others because we can't afford anything else. Plus, we want to live a simple, homesteading, intentional community kind of life.
But when it comes to big purchases like a $5000 house, we ain't got it, and no bank will loan such a tiny amount on a modular -- they want a $250K and up 30 year mortgage or nothing. Believe me, we tried everything. We even tried to get a loan against our John Deere tractor, but it seems the only kind of loan you can get against equipment is... for more equipment.
We let the bidding pass us by in November, because we couldn't get anything together. We had given up... it was torture because a new, bigger house was RIGHT THERE, just 1 mile away, in perfect shape except for a few mice and some dust. But we couldn't get it.
Then our angel stepped in. She sometimes makes micro-loans to folks, a few thousand here or there, and has always had a good experience doing this. She said she was in a bad financial situation in the past too, and knows how it feels, so now that things are okay she's paying it forward.
So now my family can go from a 900-square-foot leaky shitty trailer to an 1152-square-foot practially brand new home that was only used as an occasional vacation home. It's like a mansion to us... I can't begin to describe how wonderful this new place is compared to our ugly, crappy 1960s singlewide trailer with a leaky roof, saggy floor, hideous linoleum and shag carpets, broken windows, poor insulation and a perpetual lack of storage (among other problems... oh, I could go on and on...).
This diary is a shout-out to our personal savior, who is not Jesus (heh) but is a very giving woman who cared enough about a virtual stranger on Daily Kos to give that stranger a new home for her family.
You know who you are, and I have no doubt that you just went up a lot of notches in your personal Karma meter.
I pray that I can pay it forward some day too and help someone in need like she has done for us.
Blessed Be the Daily Kos community.