Doug Townson...A Legend of a Used Car Salesman in Louisiana

This guy is hilarious and quickly becoming a legend in Louisiana.  He's a used car salesman who posts on Youtube, etc.

I can only seem to share these shorts as a link HERE

And HERE.

And HERE

And HERE  

Some of these make me spew out my nose.

Don't look if you don't like foul language.....

Sluggy

Cajuns in the Louisiana Swamps

 Here's another Peter Santenello Video from Louisiana, among the Cajun people.

Sluggy

Southern Louisiana Cajun Life

Another video from Cajun Country......

Sluggy

The House Hunting Saga-Part 1

Not the house we bought. lolz

So Hubs and I were in no hurry to buy a house in Louisiana since we had an open ended invite to stay with daughter and son in-law at their house plus our house in Pennsylvania had just gone on the market and wasn't sold yet so no big pool of house money yet to put towards the new abode.

But I happened to be browsing on Zillow a couple of days after we arrived here and saw a house that met most if not all our criteria.  It was a well-maintained brick stick-built home of about 1800 sq. ft. on over an acre in a rural setting in East Texas.  From the photos you could tell it was an "estate" situation-someone had died who had lived there many years(the furnishings were circa 1970's)and the inheritors just wanted it sold for the $$$.  It was listed for $159,900 which was a great price for this house!

Zillow put me in touch with a licensed realtor in E. Texas and he attempted to contact the listing agent for a viewing.  While we waited for said agent to get back to us the realtor said he's take us to see some other houses(what the heck!  we had nothing else to do)in Texas.  We saw exactly 2 houses with he and his wife(also a realtor).  Both were overpriced for their condition(in the low 200's but had many condition issues we'd have to pay $$$ to fix and make the houses livable).  They were also more than an hour from daughter's place.  Later we found out that this area was one that was in demand due to the schools so houses there were going for over-inflated money even in poor condition.  We also did a drive by of a house we saw online but couldn't get a showing for that day and ruled that one out as well.  This realtor also kept pushing us to see a house well outside our price range(this one was $280K)and a distance from LA.  I think he was the listing agent for it and the seller was desperate to sell and wanted ANY offer.  We declined to see it as it was too expensive and too big and two stories.  Then he said his daughter was an agent licensed in Louisiana(he was only licensed in TX)and offered to hook us up with her, which we said ok to.

Now let's back up and add that about a week after we left PA the housing market in that area basically crashed when the FED raised interest rates .75%(They have raised rates yet again as I type this.)  Even though there was a limited number of homes in our town in PA for sale and about 5 what you'd call comparables to our home, nothing was selling.  The "your house is going to sell quickly" spiel turned into "you should be prepared to drop your asking price soon" one. sigh.

Hubs and I had figured we'd wait until our house(which we were assured would sell quickly for close to asking price)sold and then begin the new house hunt in earnest with the check for the sale of our house tucked into our account so it could fund the new house purchase.  But with the market freezing up and us getting tired of sleeping on inflatable beds(yes troll, I can fit my massive body on an air mattress without blowing it out!)our plan soon changed.

So the new plan was to regroup, go through our finances and to see how much we could afford to spend without the PA house proceeds on a new abode in LA.

Our requirements were 3 bedrooms(so we could have some separate spaces for ourselves), one floor(because I have a bum knee and climbing stairs as you age isn't fun or practical at some point). 2 bathrooms(1 ensuite with the master bedroom and a guest bath), possibly 2 living areas(as we had 2 sofas), on at least an acre of land so we didn't have to be in close proximity to potentially bad neighbors.  A dining room was not a consideration.....had one of those in PA and barely used it except for Holidays so room in the kitchen for a table would suffice.  A garage would be nice as well but we knew many homes in this area only had a car port.  

So we figured out how much we could afford to yank out of various non-retirement accounts and then contacted the realtor in Louisiana to begin looking around for a new house.

More to follow.....

Sluggy

Adventures in House Shopping Louisiana Style!

Our vacation trip to Louisiana to visit our daughter turned into a vacation/house shopping trip.

I ended up with 2 realtors because the first one I contacted weeks in advance, never got back to me with the emails of possible homes to look at before we arrived.
Ok, she did finally email me 2 days before we left for the trip but I went ahead and found another realtor in the meantime.
Realtor #2 was a bit more responsive.

So in the end we got shown houses by 2 different realtors.
It was funny that even though we gave each one the SAME criteria on what we wanted to look at, between the two of them they only wanted to show us one house in common.
Each one interpreted our needs SO differently it amazed me.

We only had a rapport with one of them, the young and new agent.  She didn't try to show us things at the top or over our price range, as she hadn't learned that "game" yet.  Honest and not trying to upsell us....I liked that.

Realtor #1 showed us mostly foreclosures, Realtor #2 showed us no foreclosures.

#2 showed up a house being sold to settle an estate and 2 regular properties.  None of these were asking less than $65K and most were at or over $80K(the limit I had set for them). 

One of those 3 places had no oven, a nonexistent living room, 1 bath and 3 tiny bedrooms and the asking price was $80K. 

Another house was tiny and had a very small fenced in yard.  The houses in this neighborhood were VERY close together and each yard for as far as the eye could see had at least one dog in it's also fenced in backyard.  Many of these dogs looked to be "outside" dogs and all hell broke loose with barking when they saw us.  I looked at my daughter and said, "If you move here with your own dog who loves to bark at other dogs, you will never have a quiet moment!" lolz

The only even acceptable house #2 showed us was the estate settlement house.  The previous owner loved to garden and the yard was full of flowers and bushes and trees.  The backyard was fenced in and there was a back porch that had been closed in to make a bonus room. Ok, the walls were fake white wood......

  Nothing in the kitchen had been updated from when it was built circa 1970 and all the appliances(except the fridge) and sink were Harvest Gold.

While ugly those appliance probably would outlast that newish fridge.
The house seemed to have the original carpeting and smelled like your grandma. 8-)

This house was in a city neighborhood with sidewalks and street lights and was on a small lot.  It was near the Air Force Base which meant it would hold it's resale value or could be rented out.  Location meant it was WAY overpriced at $89K but it was the cheapest home for sale in the subdivision(others for sale at that time were asking up to $120K).

And the house next door looked like it was a crack den.....ok, maybe not but obviously it was a rental because the outside was a hot mess and all the window blinds looked like a pit bull had played with them....often.  ;-)

Shopping foreclosed homes is an adventure I have to say.
Many of these homes suffer from neglect(if you don't have the money to pay your mortgage, you certainly don't have the money either to fix things that are broken, right?).
And due to the anger by the ex-owners toward the bank holding their mortgage, many of the foreclosed properties suffer from vandalism by the occupants before they leave(as well as actual vandals who break into vacant homes and steal things like wiring and copper pipes and appliances).

Many foreclosures are in bad shape inside.....damage to walls and doors(holes and graffitti, sledgehammers taken to toilets and sinks, cement poured into drains to harden and make the plumbing nonoperational, mirrors and lights shattered, cabinets and/or cabinet doors ripped off, carpet and other flooring ripped up.
You name it, we saw it.

One property we visited, when we got there, the front door was wide open and a huge pile of what looked like cabinetry pieces and carpeting was piled on the front yard, and there was someone inside the house cleaning the rugs. 

 

He was hired by the bank that owned that house to clean it out and up so it was sort of clean(at least the carpeting was), but take a look at the backyard of this place.......

 Besides all the junk and tree stumps, the previous owners had dug a hole and filled it with water in an attempt to make a pond.

A duplex rabbit hutch next to a child's old plastic restaurant buffet table.  I wonder if Hasenpfeffer was ever on the menu?

And take note of the mannequin floating in the "pond".  I neglected to snap a shot of the main part of the backyard, or rather the GARBAGE DUMP that made up most of the backyard.  I counted 15 plastic coolers in various states of repair(ALL of them needing repair), along with every conceivable discarded household and yard item you could think of.   There was a burn pit with what remained of a metal/plastic desk chair someone had attempted to "dispose of" in an unsuitable manner.

Though I didn't get a shot of the garbage dump yard in whole, I did snap a quickie of this shack/shed in the backyard.  You can see some of the trash that littered the yard(along with a cooler or two).  Note the interesting "Louisiana Yard Art" on the shed.  The cross is made up of rusty circular saw blades if you can't make out that much detail.
Such panache, such flavor......

After viewing this yard, I can imagine what the inside of the house looked like BEFORE the bank cleaned it out!

The problem for buyers with a bank foreclosure is that the bank will come in and clean up the property(remove damaged parts)but they don't repair or replace anything(besides roofs or missing walls).  So you see a lot of houses missing flooring, doors, ceiling fans/lighting fixtures, etc.
And since they don't replace or fix anything inside, you know you'll have to spend, to varying degrees, to get any place livable again.

And the fun really comes in when you can't see what hasn't been replaced/repaired.
While some deficits are obvious, like this house where someone took the bathtub with them......

And less obvious was the house where they had taken parts of the HVAC system so that it was nonoperational and needed to be replaced.  While the house seemed like a good deal on the surface, this small detail made it a very expensive deal!

Then we saw a place that had potential, if the previous owners hadn't gone and tried to "remodel" it.
Instead of fixing the foundation/floors of the house, they had just covered it up by installing expensive finishes(fixtures, tile and tubs/sinks)in the bathroom)over the much bigger fundamental problems.  Nice finishes in the bathrooms.....but the floors were all tilted and because of adding tile floors, the doors on the bathrooms couldn't be closed.

This place had an odd building in the front yard(one of just many oddities of this property)......

At first we thought it was an elaborate child's playhouse, but it had electricity running to it and business type stickers on the front window, so we think a previous owner had some kind of workshop upstairs and sold something in the downstairs room.  It was in disrepair(the flooring was rotted through)so we couldn't even go inside it(plus the top room was locked).
I did think, with some repairs/modifications, it would make a really cool chicken house! lolz
It's just too bad the house was a cobbled together mess, the long driveway required at least $5K in repairs, and it had an algae-filled pond "mosquito breeding pool" out front that needed aeration work or draining.

Among all these horror stories, we did find a gem in the end, IF the inspection comes back clean.

Sluggy
 

About A House

We just got back from a vacation trip to Louisiana to see our daughter.
She left to go live there last May, so it's almost been a year since we've seen her.

We've been talking about where to move to once Hubs retires for a couple years now.
Among the places we've considered is somewhere down South, concentrating on looking at states where the retirement $ goes farther(either/or the state doesn't tax it too heavily or the cost of living is low-ish for other reasons).
And we are sick and tired of dealing with snow.  30 years living up north is enough for me!
Plus we want to be somewhere close to at least one of our kids.

The youngest is just entering college(and there is no way to know where he'll end up being based), and the oldest isn't settled yet(due to the GF's schooling still not being finished)....plus he isn't planning on having kids(so far).
Which leaves the middle child, who is planning on getting married and having kids as soon as it's financially feasible.
And since she is in Louisiana, we thought we'd go looking at house opportunities while we were down there visiting her.
This area of Louisiana is lousy with foreclosures!
And it seems the housing situation of choice for 90% of the folks in this area is a mobile or manufactured home.

Since her living situation can't continue on as it has the past year, it needs to change now that she isn't going to school but is working fulltime, we figured IF we found a place now, but aren't going to be able to live in it for at least 4 years from now, the daughter could live there and pay us nominal rent and pay the utilities.
This would be a great deal for her and she'd be able to save some money up and have a good living situation for 4 years or so.  It would also help us to not have the house vacant and a target for vandals wanting to steal the copper wiring/pipes and other things out of it.

If we bought a manufactured home it could be older and if the daughter and her dog lived there we wouldn't worry about fixing it up too much(no new carpets, etc. since the dog would ruin them).  Heck it the home was real old, we'd just have it hauled off when we came down there and build a new home(or buy a new manufactured home).

So that was the initial plan going down there......look at properties and see if anything fit the bill.
Of course, since we weren't going to sell our PA house to use that money to pay for this LA house, it had to be a really good and cheap deal, as we were paying cash out of pocket(savings)for it.

We spent 2 days looking at properties with a different realtor each day.  The daughter went with us, but we saw a couple of houses the first day with that realtor after daughter had to leave us and go to work.

And one of those 2 houses daughter didn't see seemed like a great deal.  It was a foreclosure for $53K, a manufactured house on an acre of land.
So we made plans on our 3rd day down there to take daughter and her BF to go back to see that one.

While we were out with realtor #2, realtor #1 called us with a new foreclosure listing, so we decided to go see that last property the day we were taking the kids to see the one going for $53K.

We went to see the last property before the $53K one.
And both of the kids fell in love with it.  The yard was fabulous and the house was in great shape(as far as we could tell). Though my daughter's commute to work would be a little long(not too long), it was perfect for them in every other way.

We still went to see the $53K property but they didn't like it as well as this last one.

And here is where the plan changed from US  buying the house and the kids living in it for 4 or so years and paying rent, to the daughter buying the house and keeping it.

In the foreclosure game you have HUD houses and you have Fannie Mae(Home Path)houses.
When a foreclosure comes up for sale under these agencies, only owner/occupants get first crack at buying them.  For the first 15 days(sometimes 30 days)these properties can only be bought by a non-profit organization, government agency or an individual who will be living in the home as their primary residence.

This is to allow people who really need the home first crack at them before the investors(flippers or folks who want to hold them to rent them out) and people buying vacation/second homes.
The last home(will refer to it as house #1 from now on)was just listed the day before and wasn't even on the Fannie Mae website yet.
The $53K house(will refer to this house as #2 from now on)was going off the "protected time phase" 3 days later from the day we saw it, meaning bidding was open to all, not just owner/occupants by the time we could get an offer in for it, and Hubs and I could buy it ourselves...but we'd be in a bidding war possibly with investors.

As you can imagine, all the really good deals, if they aren't snatched up within the first 15 days are gone asap as soon as the protected phase expires, plus once the investors can bid, the price usually goes well above the initial asking price if it's a good property.  So if a good property is still not sold by the time the investors can snag it, it's going to be more expensive than the asking price.

So in order to put an offer in on house #1, our daughter had to be the buyer.  We asked about having me and her on the bid and contract/deed but we both would have had to occupy the house.
So she had to make the offer.

This didn't also mean that she had to PAY for the house.  It doesn't matter where she gets the $ to pay for it, as long as the bank gets paid.
But where she gets the $ from can have tax implications from the giver.

We did some research and any person can gift up to $14K a year to their child without negative tax implications, meaning a couple can gift a combined total of $28K a year per child.

So we will gift her $28K for the house.  Since she had decided not to continue college at this point, we used most of what is left of her college money for this gift.

The rest of the cost of the house we will be making her a personal loan(a totally legal contract/promissory note), which she will pay back over the next 10 years at a nominal interest rate.

We sat down last weekend and wrote her and the BF out a budget and between their existing bills and this loan repayment(and the new bills for utilities, house insurance, etc.)they will still have a cushion each month for savings/emergency fund.

So the offer was made the day we left Louisiana on Monday and Wednesday, right as we pulled into a place for lunch in Athens, Tennessee, we got a call from the daughter that the bank accepted the offer.
So we had to drive until 3 am to get home that night to get to the bank to get a bank check for the earnest money and overnight it to the broker, per the bank's requirements.

The kids are so thrilled!
And I'll be able to exhale next Tuesday after the home inspector says all systems are good and there aren't any big money surprises and things that need fixing.

With a foreclosed bank HUD/FM home, you can't ask for reductions if something is not working.  Everything is sold "AS IS".  If the inspector finds expensive problems that need price reductions, you have to withdraw your offer totally and make a new offer and start the process all over again at a lower price.  It's a big PITA and if they don't respond before the protected phase, because then you are bidding against investors and the price could go too high.

If everything goes smoothly from here, the daughter will be a property owner on May 9th and will own it free and clear before her 31st birthday(if not sooner).

**And House #2?
It was snapped up the day it went out of the protected phase on Tuesday by an investor, as we knew it would be.

Next time, I'll share details & pictures of the property.


Sluggy