A Medical Diagnosis Leads To A Better Life

Our Story - From Big House To Very Small House

It's unfortunate that it took a serious medical issue to make us realize that we needed to live a better, healthier lifestyle. It's unfortunate that we are not the only ones that waited until something happened before making the decision to create a better lifestyle.

Making the change to from our big home to a very small house was the catalyst for all the other positive changes that have come into our lives in the past few years.

I would like to explain however it would be an extremely long article if I were to do it all at once. For that reason, I'm going to break it down into a few more manageable articles, published over a few days.

A little history:

2010 - In March, my husband was told that the job that he was on contract with would end within six months. He immediately started looking for a new job and by May, he had secured one. Problem was, it was in another city that was seven hours away.

My job had not been treating me well for a long time and I was thinking of leaving it so we made the decision to sell our house and move. There was nothing that was holding us there.

By June, he was gone and our house was up for sale. We lived in a small country town. Add to that the fact that we were in the middle of the recession. Needless to say, interest in our house was minimal. We hadn't expected that...

For the next 18 months, my husband would travel home every second weekend.

The situation was exhausting and stressful for both of us - emotionally and financially. Our expenses were high - he was paying rent in the new city, the cost of travelling every few weeks was expensive, and we still had all the expenses from the house.

The longer this went on, the more we were feeling the strain.

September 2011 - we finally got an offer on the house however it was much lower than what we were asking, and slightly lower than what we had paid for it when we bought. After carefully weighing our options, we decided to go for it. Within a few days, we had confirmed the sale at a price slightly higher than what was offered but it was still a huge loss for us.

We made this decision because it was costing us more to live two separate lives.

But that wasn't the end of the bad news. We still had one year left on our mortgage. We weren't planning to buy another house at the other end because we were very discouraged after what we had just gone through.

The bank (Royal Bank of Canada) was not very helpful with our predicament. In fact, they wouldn't even look at any other option except to charge us a penalty of approximately $10,000.00. They simply asked us why we hadn't looked at any other option such as renting our house or lease to own. We were insulted and angry - of course we had tried those options...

So, instead of trying to help us in our time of need - they simply charged us with a huge penalty (our lawyer told us he had never seen anyone have a penalty so high in his entire career!).

The penalty in combination with the loss on the sale of the house just about wiped out all the money that we had invested in housing. And the past year or so had just about wiped out our savings.

We were depressed, discouraged and angry.

And we had some more difficult decisions to make especially when it came to affordable housing options.