Germany, Funeral, Wedding, Pregnancy, Church, Practice and More?

Alright. I think there are about a gazillion things to write about, talk about, share. And thanks to my jetlag, all I want to do right now is sleep. So, we'll probably split this post into the little posts on all the stuff I just mentioned in the title.

Let's start with the practice:

We should own the practice tomorrow, June 11th. After more negotiations, and more drama, and feeling sick to our stomachs, and being ready to throw in the towel and walk away from it all, and seriously wondering if we are making the right decisions, we went with the advice from  our lending bank and Henry's consultant and conceded to the (in our opinion) over-priced building price to be able to close on the practice. It did help me sleep better at night, but it is still somewhat terrifying to seal the deal. We did feel right about coming here when we first made the choice. But with all the drama and hardship we already had out here, I think we have come to really doubt ourselves. And I cannot say that we felt incredibly reassured despite prayers. I think we just felt that whatever we chose would be ok. So, we chose 'employment now' over 'unemployment now'.

All I have to say is that you may not ever want to waste your money on an appraiser. We did, and we regret it. We got an appraiser when we found out that the building was 1/4 smaller than the seller said, and she just shrugged it off, saying square footage had nothing to do with the price. We disagreed, and suggested in order to determine a fair price we could get an appraisal. We had struggled to figure out a fair price for the building because we live in the middle of nowhere, and good comparable commercial buildings are somewhat hard to come by in these parts. We had hoped that an appraisal would sort out the issue for us. However, Mr. Appraiser simply only used comps from the next big town 1-hour away (Redding) and based all of his calculations of off that. With that he determined that the price he had already agreed on was right on target. Henry, however, noticed by looking at his calculations that if he would have included some actual rental prices from Burney, or even given more consideration to the rental prices of buidlings already rented (and not ones open to be rented) our building price would have dropped by nearly $40,000.

So, it was rather extremely frustrating to have the appraisal come up with the price it did. The dude actually suggested a rental price per square foot that is higher than what seller pays for her practice in Redding (she pays $1.05 per sq/ft). Here in Burney, the average rental price per sq/ft is about $0.60. And yet, she totally insisted on leaving the rental price at what the appraisal came up with...I mean, I understand that she would have been in a similar position of annoyance had the appraisal come in really low, but honestly - be reasonable!!!!!! We weren't even trying to get the price anymore that we thought was actually closer to the real value. We just didn't want to pay a price that we negotiated on the information our realtor provided us with when we all thought the building was bigger than it actually was.

Urgh. It all turned pretty nasty. But now it's over. Thank goodness. Now Henry just has to resolve some staff fighting issues, figure out when his biller/book keeper is going to retire (the seller told us last year how someone was already being trained for that position and things were going well, and then we found out that that had NOT happened, and we barely got someone in in April to be trained...bleh!!!), and figure out how to handle his various business bank accounts (we have one in town to deposit any cash, but we needed one with the bank who is our lender, and they will automatically withdraw the monthly debt payments from that account, which means we have to figure out how to move around all that money to make those payments - ANNOYING!). I hope this is all worth it in the end. I hope we made the right choice, but I guess at this point it just is what it is.