With much crossing of fingers and toes...

...we're not quite out of the housing market. Yet. :)

Our realtor and I had a talk the day after this whole thing blew up...by putting our respective heads together, we came up with something that might---might---end up saving the house for us (ethically.) In a nutshell, the county agency which administers our down payment programs has never seen our file. In other words, the lender (from the bank that bought First Unethical Bank of California) was telling us that we wouldn't qualify for the down payment program due to some mythical (and esoteric) formula, but he didn't really know, because the agency didn't even have our file.

Yeah. I'd call that a small detail, wouldn't you?

And it might be a long shot, and a failed one at that. The lender could be right, yadda, yadda. But he could be wrong. So it's our last shot, but one we needed to take. So we did.

And ethically, I'll feel a lot better in either case. If it fails, we know we tried everything. If it doesn't fail, and we can get into the house on terms that work for us, then we did something right and ethical to get there.

The ethics of the whole thing really made me think. In real estate, as in life, there are a lot of grey areas and things which can be done which are not, precisely, illegal or unethical, but are bumping up mighty hard against that line. And that's a kind of karma (for lack of a better term) that we really don't want. Karma like that has a bad way of following you around.

Or put another way: whatever you put out, comes back three times over...so it's best to be mighty careful about what you put out in the universe. If we get the house ethically, then that's fine. If we don't...it wasn't meant to be. And we'll regroup and try again later.

But for now, we're content, knowing we did the best we could with what we have.