Craziness abounds in my life.. Well, not exactly, but there's a big 'shift' going on right now, and as Luc and I were saying last night, everything is up in the air right now, opportunities are piling up around us, and we really need to give things time to settle before we figure out what our next move in life is...

I spoke with our mortgage broker yesterday, and while our current lender won't work a deal with us to extend the term and/or remortgage the property to release some more moolah for upgrades, there's potentially another lender that is willing to do all that, and sooner, so I have him looking into that for us. The idea would be to try to get some money out of the house now, so we could put Luc on the course he wants to take, as well as pay off some of our debts. However, no sooner did I get off the phone with the mortgage broker, then the real estate agent called. Apparently we have a potentially very interested buyer on our hands. Hmmm.. He's going to see it in early January, and if he likes it, will put in an offer right then and there.
So it begs yet another question - what do we want to do? Keep the house, invest our money (and that of our tenants of course) into making it better, and sell it when we'll make a profit? Or cut our losses now and walk away, at least eliminating any stress that comes along with trying to find tenants and do repairs/maintain the property? Hmmm...
Difficult really to say what will be best... I guess I am going to take the usual Shelley approach and just 'wait and see what happens', knowing that either way, we gain something (either independence and lack of stress, or money)... One thing I DO know, is that the next house we buy should be newer, because while I think 'hey, if we got rid of the apartments, we could put in a new kitchen and refinish the floors in our house (+ another list of things a mile long)' I realize that to me, that is a MAJOR inconvenience, and I believe Luc shares that view as well... So we'll both stall on it until we lose the opportunity to do anything about it.. Hm...

Secondly, my job has taken on much the same feeling as our apartments - it's like I've reached a fork in the road here too, and various possibilities have been presented to me, none with any guarantees, however, and so for now, I wait to see what happens, but either way it will eventually come down to a few key questions that all wittle away to 'money, or peace of mind?' because, I find, despite what the big corporations will tell you (that money buys happiness), money does NOT buy peace of mind, in a lot of ways. Yes, it ensures you no longer have to worry about 'survival' things, but you DO have to worry about a lot of petty, seemingly important, but ultimately draining things in life once you're playing with moolah... At any given time, any one of us could find big dollars, if we're willing to take risks for it - ex: I could become a sub contractor, give up any sense of security in my job, have to take on the marketing for myself, months off would be spent at home, unpaid (and stressing), but I'd make twice what I make now... Conversely, I could go find myself a cushy job in the gov't, doing a job that potentially does have a fairly low 'ceiling' on it (read: the salary stops quite short of where it'd be if I was NOT working for the gov't), with the risk of extreme boredom, but hey, I'd be secure and know that I would always have a job to go to... So that's what I'm weighing now too. Not subcontracting, that's not for me, but either consulting through my agency (which I love, but where I will have to invest a lot of time and hard work to really get anywhere), or taking a step down and finding a gov't job, refocusing myself on other aspects of ma vie... Hmmm... So I wait... :)

Lots of musing about boring things I guess.. Sorry!