Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Hello,

If you’ve bought a house in the Upstate in the last ten years, you may have had an experience like Mallory and I had when we bought our house six years ago. The housing market was highly competitive.

At one point, we were going to compromise what we wanted, and we put an offer in on a foreclosure only to get entangled in a bidding war on a house we weren’t even excited about. In other news, Ansley continues to grow like a weed!

By the time we found our house we were shopped out. We had looked at so many houses we were ready to just buy something in order to be done. We happened upon our now house and the build of it had just been completed. It was ready!

The builder had a tract of land, and he had just cleared enough trees to build one house at a time. There were trees in the adjacent lot. We offered the asking price after we did a casual look through of the house with our realtor. The seller came back the next day after we made our offer, and he had some interesting news…

As it turns out, in the wooded area adjacent to our house is a cemetery. Nobody would have even known it was there if it had not been marked on the surveyor’s document. The issue was that the graveyard area is not in a perfect square. It is crooked with the way the house was built on the tract of land.

While Mallory can sometimes be superstitious, I tend to not be too creeped out by ghostly things. Our realtor’s advice was that some people probably would not mind it, but people who subscribe to some religions may have issues with buying our house in the future.

Every year we talk about having a haunted trail for Halloween, but we’ve never been able to find enough friends to be goblins! If you’d like to apply for the position, please let me know. Amelia is pictured below from a few years ago in her Halloween dress.

The positive about the graveyard is it gave us a larger buffer from the eventual neighbors, and the original half-acre lot we had originally thought we were getting was expanded to a full acre upon our requirement to own the graveyard, if we were going to buy the house.

My idea when we bought the house was, we may live in the house for up to ten years. If we have a ten-year outlook, we have time for markets to recover if we experience a downturn. Mallory keeps the girls in their fall fashion! Ansley below.

But now we have two kids we didn’t have when we moved into our house and we are desperately needing more space now. If you have been watching the news lately you may have seen interest rates rising and home sales slowing. It’s easy to panic when we begin looking at situations in small timeframes. It’s important when markets are volatile to understand that this probably isn’t the end of time and things are probably not as bad as they may feel right now.

HOWEVER…

The above sentiment should only apply to folks who have spent the time to create a well thought out plan of action for their finances with a trusted advisor. Many people have been able to ignore proper planning because the markets have been positive, but when pressure is applied our lack of planning is revealed.

Questions you may want to consider asking yourself right now:

We can’t have complete safety, complete protection, and rapid growth in one financial instrument.

What is most important to me? Safety of my funds, protection of my funds, or growth of my funds?
Which combination of these is appropriate for me?
When will I need to access my funds (how long can I wait for my funds to recover from a down market)?

If you have saved for retirement, and you do not know the answers to these three questions, I’d encourage you to find a trusted advisor to help you work through these challenging questions.

If you have questions or would like clarification of something I’ve shared here please don’t hesitate to call our office at 864.641.7955.

Until next week,

David C. Treece,

Financial Advisor

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