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Buying a house 5 dollars at a time

IT APPEARS GOFUNDME ONLY ALLOWS 5$ OR MORE PER DONATION. So find 4 friends that also want to give and pool in on a 5$ donation! 










TL;DR

1$ will buy very little today; a pack of M&M's, a pack of gum, a bottle of water, a single vending machine condom, two postage stamps etc. But wait, what if we get hundreds or thousands of people to pool their dollar, what could happen? I want you to give me ONE DOLLAR. Your dollar will then go towards my house down payment fund for my disabled mother and I to move into a house that doesn't resemble a Third World hovel.


Hi there!


I'm Ryan Mercer, you can find my home on the web at www.RyanMercer.com . I'm 30, I'm single, my mother and I live together as she had to retire early via disability due to several health complications and my father passed away 12 days before my 13th birthday (which left my mother's retirement savings quite pitiful). She raised me and took care of me so now it's my turn to take care of her, we currently live in the house she's upside down on that needs the plumbing completely gutted and replaced, the electrical completely gutted and replaced, a wall that sustained water damage completely removed and replaced etc. As her health continues to decline, and as more and more problems crop up with the house, I'd like to buy a house that could be considered livable for us to move into so that she might have a better quality of life for her the rest of her 60's (and god willing 70's, 80's and 90's!). I myself am not very marketable on the job front, I have a GED because of moronic choices and no college degree. I make more than a lot of people but at my current rate of savings it will take several years for me to raise a 10-20% down payment.


Attempting an interesting social experiment, with a little bit of momentum, people giving a SINGLE DOLLAR each could quickly help me have the adequate funds to get us into a better house. I can handle a mortgage on a reasonably sized house for four (hey, I'd like to marry and have a child some day and would prefer to stay in the same house for the bulk of my life because buy-sell-buy-sell-buy-sell is a great way to waste money) but coming up with the 10-20% required for a down payment is proving a tediously slow task and I want my mother to be comfortable for as much of her remaining life as possible. We truly don't need a lot of space, a small 3-4 bedroom in the 1300-1350qft range would be more than adequate for our current needs and allow me to someday have room for a wife and child. In my area 100-120k$ would be more than adequate to purchase a house of this size with a yard that would provide a decent bit of area for square-foot gardening (can whatever I can't eat fresh!) depending on the age/condition/how long any given house has been on the market. I'd be over the moon if I could raise as little as 10k which would put me at 10-15% down payment. That's only ten-thousand people donating a single dollar (seriously, I only want a single dollar from each person that gives!!!). Sure I'd love to raise more though, raising enough to combine with what I have now to get me to 20% of a down payment would be wonderful to avoid the silliness of PMI!

Where did I get this idea? Well originally I was trying to think of ways to raise a down payment for a house faster and saw there are several crowd-funding sites that exist as replacements for wedding registries to help couples raise funds for a house and just for folks in general looking to see if their friends and family would cough a few bucks up to help with a down payment. Well, I didn't care for that idea as only asking friends and family creates the burden of your loved ones thinking they need to give a worthwhile amount of money. So I'm sitting at work one day and thinking about frugality and the power of a dollar and how a dollar doesn't go far for most things and I was listening to a podcast where they were mentioning some crowd-funding campaign in their news segment and it hit me. I'll get as many people as I can to give just a single dollar and chances are they won't miss it but as more and more people each sacrifice a buck it could quickly turn into something significant to me so I figured hey let's put some real thought into this experiment and see if we can make something happen!

See, for a lot of people 1$ isn't much. 1$ is something you'll contribute towards a birthday gift for your boss, it'll buy you a can of soda from a vending machine but not a bottle, it'll get you some snacks in a vending machine but not others, it might buy you a cup of coffee or a value/dollar menu item from a fast-food establishment. Look under your car seat or in your couch cushions, you probably have a dollar of change hiding out there and you don't even know it! So join me in this social experiment, gift me just ONE dollar towards buying a house and let's see if we can make this happen!

I'll be updating http://www.IGaveABuck.com regeularly with blog posts about this social experiment!

Please DO NOT give more than 1 dollar! Seriously! All I want is 1 dollar from each person that wants to give to this idea.

Organizer

Ryan Mercer
Organizer
Indianapolis, IN

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