Now comes the hard part: finding a way to finance our dream house

We’re still in a holding pattern on our house purchase, with little to report. We need to put our Gig Harbor view house on the market. We had hoped to reach an agreement for our renter to buy it, but that didn’t work out. We have a couple of other possibilities, but it’s too soon to tell if they are real prospects. Meanwhile, we have decided that even if the view house doesn’t sell by April 25, we will somehow find a way to move ahead with the purchase of the Montecarlo house. We like it that much.

We met with a loan broker in Lucca Thursday and started filling out paperwork to apply for a loan here. I have called my banker in Gig Harbor and also the financial adviser who helps administer my retirement accounts. I have four possible routes to come up with the 160,000 euros we need to complete the purchase: take money out of my retirement account, borrow money from my retirement account, get a personal or business loan from my bank or get a loan from an Italian bank. Probably it will be some combination of the above, depending on the terms and interest rates we are offered.

We can definitely pull some together to make it work, but making loan payments will really stretch us thin come next winter when our road maintenance work slows down. We need to have the view house sold by the end of 2015 if we want to keep eating—not to mention go to Italy to actually use the new house.