Shopping with a 7 year old Mad Hatter

I do believe I've created a monster in my sweet 7 year old daughter. As a baby, I dressed her in bright colors and never dresses. She just wasn't a 'dress' baby. She wore denim overalls, camoflauged pants and hiking boots. About the age of 4 we would let her choose her own clothes and when shopping, allowed her to choose between pre-chosen options.

When entering Kindergarten, we allowed her to make her daily clothing choices. The ladies outside of her school would look forward to her arrival in the mornings to see what kind of outfit she had put together. She often chose colors and prints that never matched. I always made sure her tights were unusual and her shoes, while keeping them inexpensive, were on the trendier side. She adored her headbands and hair bows and was always accessorized. She refused to wear an 'outfit' like the other girls in her class.

Now, she's still the same way. She's changed from tights to leggings. Won't wear an 'outfit' and still chooses to put colors and patterns together that one wouldn't normally choose. We take her shopping and allow her to pick out her own clothes. She has more costume jewelry than one her age should have and plenty of headbands, flower clips and sparkly things for her hair. Her pocketbook holds several chapsticks or girly lipgloss purchased from stores like Libby Liu (I think this is how this is spelled).

While some moms I know think I'm giving my Mad Hatter to much leeway by allowing her to choose her clothes every day and not policing her outfits. As long as the clothes are clean, they fit and she's not inappropriately dressed for the season/activity/outing, I really don't care what she has on. I've taken her to the grocery in her full-on princess dress up including tiara and dress up shoes. She was dressed, clean and had shoes on. She was happy, I was happy, why start a battle over something so trivial?

We are the same way with 4 year old Chunky. He's a little more bull-headed in our direction. He'd rather wear jeans when it's sweltering hot and flip flops all year long. And he'll wear the same favored t-shirt daily if we'd let him.

Shopping with Mad Hatter is exhausting and time consuming. She wants everything but not what I want to buy. We went for new 'fashion' boots and walked out with an outfit as well. I had a coupon and the outfit was mostly on clearance. Chunky, on the other hand, generally wants toys when clothes shopping. And if he's in the mood for clothes shopping, he wants stuff that doesn't come in his size or shoes...which he doesn't need.

Tomorrow is closet and season change cleanout time. In their closets and mine. I'm very scared and what is going to remain. Closets will be as empty as my pocketbook is going to be. Floods and hoochie skirts are not approved in this house.

Being a landlord Part II

Something else I forgot to mention when trying to rent out your property...ask to be involved in every step of finding renters. Demand to be at the house when people walk through. Even if you walk out the door as they are walking in. You want to know what type of people are walking through your home. Also, ask to see the results of the background and credit check. Ask to see responses to personal and prior rental references. Demand to be the final say on who you will rent to and how much you want for rent. We didn't get to do this with our first tenant. If we had, we might have made a different decision. We would never discriminate on a situation EVER, but we'd have taken a harder and longer look at the financial situation. Cosigner or not.

Take pictures of everything in your home the day you release the property to the renter. EVERYTHING. When that renter moves out, take photos of EVERYTHING the day they fully vacate. Don't do anything, don't clean, do nothing. If you can be there the day the tenant vacates and can do an exit walkthrough, please do this. Document everything. Sign everything. Keep all receipts. If you can't be there, ask a close friend. If you have a property manager, ask them.

If you opt to try to find tenants and create a lease from online documents, talk with a lawyer who does landlord/tenant law. Ask them to create the lease for you or review the lease you want to use. As a landlord, you want to be fully covered legally in the event your tenant fails to pay rent, acquires pets you don't approve of/agree to or abandons the property and leaves it a mess. If you have to go after your tenant for back rent, eviction, etc., lawyer up. Do everything by the book. In most cases, if you have to seek legal help, the costs go back to the tenant. Be prepared in the event that it does not. Your lawyer should be able to help you understand what would be involved in the way of time and money.

If you've never used one, find a good CPA to help do your taxes. Ours gave us a worksheet so come tax time, we could send him everything he needs to complete our taxes. We can call him at any point to ask tax questions and we love that. He's been our tax guy for 10 years. There were so many things we forgot to track and submit for taxes. I started an excel file to track rental revenue, rental loss and all the different areas from the worksheet given to us. I notate if I have a receipt for the expense.

On a separate tab, I've created a worksheet for the actual tenant. I keep track of rent and the date it hits my account, late fees, property management fees, and then I track important conversations with dates and overview of conversation, reason for any large repairs, verbal agreements made with the tenant and reasons for non-payment of rent (if applicable). I also track dates of lease and then put a meeting request in my outlook calendar for 60 days before lease expiration (this is usually the time you can start showing the property for new tenants if your current tenants don't want to renew or you don't want to renew with the tenant).

If you, my fellow reader, have any tips and tricks to being a landlord that you find extremely helpful, please leave me a comment. I'd love to hear about them and share with others. If you are a tenant and have comments on how to be a better landlord, I'd love to hear and share them too. We are tenants as well, however I feel like even tho we live in a rental, we are treating it as if we own it because we'd want our tenants to treat our home the same way. But that's a whole other post on living in military housing.

Being a Landlord

Since the housing market wouldn't support what we needed to be able to sell our home, we had no other option but to rent the house. I had a really hard time coming to terms with that. We bought the house in 1999. Soldier and I had dated less than a year and I'd never bought a house. So much blood, sweat and tears went into this house. We got married, had two babies, created 10 years of our life in this house. We macked out the kitchen three years prior and I was so much in love with it. And we were in a great place financially.

We got what I thought was a great realtor to get the house rented for us. We just had to keep the house clean at that point. There was very little we had to do to get the house renter ready.

We talked many times with the realtor about property management or do we manage it ourselves from out of state. We figured it would be easy enough to manager ourselves. We knew a lot of tradespeople if work needed to be done and Soldier's parents live 10 minutes away if there was an emergency.

We got a tenant rather quickly and we adored them. Everything went well for some time. We knew the entire situation and I felt for them. I probably got to emotionally vested in them. I'm a generous person by nature and always want to give the benefit of the doubt. I think this was my downfall. I was to trusting and lenient. Our realtor wanted us to evict, but we knew we didn't have a legal leg to stand on. There was discussion about breaking the lease and because we knew the situation, we were willing to do whatever would make their situation easier.

Fast forward three months and we sent a letter asking for the final months rent and part of the expenses that were put out getting the house back in order. Maybe I worded it wrong, maybe my execution wasn't right, I don't know. We have a property manager for the tenants now and I ran this entire thing by her. She's been doing property management for years and I thought I was doing the right thing. She and my other voice of reason read through the letter and supporting documents and said everything looked OK and nothing was incorrectly stated based on the supporting documents I had.

What I received back in communication was heart stopping. I was being accused of things that never crossed my mind and things were said that I knew to not be true. I was angry, hurt, scared and mortified. I called Soldier and he went nuts. I called my voice of reason and she shared stuff with me to really make me thing about next steps. I called our property manager and she was totally miffed.

After much thought, discussion and trying to sleep on it, I decided to call a lawyer. We had a fantastic discussion and he assured me of some fears that I had. I feel much better about how we decided to proceed. I would advise new landlords to keep everything from receipts to texts to emails or other types of communication. Have everything in writing and signed by both sides if changes or arrangements outside of the lease have been made.

I will forever advise landlords to hire a property management company. We love ours and our property manager is amazing. She's a great buffer and gives us plenty to think about when making decisions about repairs and gives us her honest opinion about situations that come up. It's worth the monthly fee to have her. She's local, knows the neighborhood and has plenty of knowledge and experience.

Financially, I would advise new landlords to be wise in their spending. Just because the mortgage is or almost is being covered by rent, don't assume it's going to be that way. Always budget the mortgage in full just in case. I didn't and am scraping the barrel until October. My credit score fell over a hundred points and I'm late on everything. Soldier pays all the house bills and childcare since I pay for all things house. I hadn't been late making a mortgage payment in years. Now, I'm on a repayment plan because I was always a month behind since losing rent from when our first tenant vacated and had to put quite a bit of money into the house to get it ready to rent. The new tenants have been nickel and diming stuff and there's that cost. Those have pretty much stopped. I'm not spending money where it's not needed and staggering bills and makely barely the minimum payments just to stop the calls. If I could go back to this time last year and have a re-do with the knowledge I have now, I would. Hands down. I'd take the good, bad and ugly that came with regular life, but would do things different in regards to being a landlord. And unfortunately, our role as a landlord are not going to change anytime soon.

Military life, Military wife

After we received clearance that our on-post housing was ready, Soldier did the walk through, signed the lease and got the keys. He moved everything he had been using at the hotel into the house as well as whatever he thought we'd need from the storage facility he rented. Kids and I packed up what we had at Soldier's parents house and started the drive.

Saying goodbye to all of our wonderful friends and our forever home (we had a tenant at this point) was one of the hardest things, as a family, we've done. I was scared. Our safety net was completely gone. Everything was going to be brand new for our entire family. I'd never been to where we were moving. Never even been to the state. I knew nothing about full time military life. I was and probably still am completely ignorant about the etiquette of being a military wife.

As the schools here start very early in August, we opted to start the Mad Hatter in first grade after Labor Day. That gave us a week to unpack, find our way around and get settled. We had been able to get all the paperwork online, printed, filled out and submitted since Soldier had been 'living' here for about 6 weeks. And let me tell you, there was TONS of paperwork and forms. And nothing could be submitted online.

Soldier met us at the front gate so he could be sure we got through OK and then follow him to our home. Post has very strict speed zones and gnarly implications for getting tickets so Soldier made it VERY clear that obeying the speed zones is crucial.

Upon arriving to our new home, Soldier walked us around outside. Mind you, it was about 300 degrees and 100% humidity. Nothing like where we came from. The grass here was pretty brown and pokey. Everything was a bit droopy and it was very quiet.

We came in the front door and I was really rather surprised. The entire home had been freshly painted a modern neutral color. The floors were parquet hardwood. Kitchen and bathroom were a linoleum. It was a far cry from our forever home but I was a bit excited to get our household items and furniture so we could settle in. Those came about 3 days after we arrived. It was bean bag chairs, inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags until then.

It's been a few days over one year. I still miss my forever home with the gorgeous kitchen, windows that aren't drafty and carpet. We are comfortable here and settled. I can't really complain. Much. I know more about our new neighbors of a few weeks than I do the neighbors that we met the day after we moved in.

I have no female relationships at all here. Soldier and I haven't had a date night since moving here. We don't have a sitter and finding one who doesn't come recommended from someone we know isn't much of an option since we don't really 'know' anyone that we mesh with well.

But I'm not complaining. Soldier comes home every night. Mad Hatter is doing well in the second grade and Chunky started Pre-K and is writing his name and doing really well.