The House Saga - Part 1

Background

This started about a year and a half ago. I guy the wife and I know was looking to sell his cats only kennel. I was getting out of the military and was tired of working for "the man". We considered buying his business. He was a bit dismissive when we spoke to him about it, so we sat on the idea while I considered other options.

About 6 months ago we decided to get more serious. We approached him again and he was much more receptive. We started to make plans and we considered selling my house, as his business is attached to his home and he wanted to sell both. As we spoke to him more, I did not get good feelings about the financial situation. I felt he was not being up front about how much money the business made and I started to question if the deal was something we should do. These questions led to this post, when the wife accused me of trying to back out of the deal and not "finishing" anything.

To anyone who may not know, we decided not to buy this business. The final straw came when, after telling this guy several times that we wanted to see proper financial statements (and he would just show us his wife's tax return), we have a lunch meeting for him to give us the statements. Much to our surprise, he pulls out a real estate agreement and proceeds to start filling it out with how much we are going to pay, the conditions, etc. We had given him conditions and more info months ago and he was to use it to write up an agreement which I was then going to take to our lawyer. Yet it was down to crisis time and he still had not done this stuff. That, plus him constantly telling me I did not need to see financial statements, I did not need a lawyer, etc, finally was too much to bear. Actually, I would have ended the whole thing sooner, but the wife wanted to do it, and it took me a while convince her that the alarm bells screaming in my head should be heeded.

This decision put us in a bit of a bind. We had put up and sold our house as a sign of good faith and fully planning to move and take over this business. Now we had an agreement to sell, no place to live and 6 weeks to find something.

To be continued...