A Home For the Wright Family

2020 ended with a blow for my family. We got a notice that the landlord is selling our rental house and won’t renew the lease. We have to buy it or vacate it by the end of February. We really don't want to leave, and to stay here we need help to get a down payment.

Moving right now would be extremely challenging—financially, and for physical and mental health issues we’ve been struggling with (more on that below). It's also hard to find a rental place who will take our dog, because our fur baby is now considered a “restricted breed.”

We've had a bad few years, and we're not prepared for this. Whether we end up needing a down payment here or to move somewhere else, we're going to be scrambling to afford it.


How we got here:
Things started getting rough for us in 2017. My stepfather left my mother, Mackenzie, and completely blindsided her. Things got ugly, and it took almost two years and lawyers in two different states to handle the divorce and custody battle. That consumed a lot of time, energy, and money. Mackenzie decided to cut her losses and didn’t even fight for child support because her ex kept moving to avoid it.

During all this, we moved from Florida to Tennessee. My mother rented the house we live in now with my brothers, my grandmother, and their dog, Ben, while I had a nearby apartment. My family fell in love with the house. It’s nothing fancy, but for the last couple of years it's been the most peaceful, stable place they've been for a very long time. That's been especially important for my youngest brother, Quintin, who was diagnosed with anxiety and as being on the autistic spectrum right before he turned 18. What his dad put us through stressed him out more than anyone, and having that stability is extremely important for him to feel calm and secure.

In 2018 my grandmother’s already-rocky health plummeted. My mother was the only family left to look after her and had helped her to move with them, and things got bad faster than anyone could have guessed. For a year and a half she needed extensive home care that took up most of everybody's time, a significant amount of money, and kept Mackenzie from being able to look for jobs like she'd initially planned.

My grandmother died at the end of 2019. The plan was to chip down the credit cards and work on saving a down payment, but the events of 2020 threw us for another loop. My mother is diabetic and has scarring on her lungs from sarcoidosis, an auto-immune disease. She's at an extremely high risk for COVID and that changed her original plans for jobhunting entirely. She worked from home but work availability in her field kept decreasing due to the economic instability. She lost all her clients by summer.

In October 2020, I lost my apartment and my family took me in. While I work and help with the household as much as I can, my own unexpected move wiped out most of my savings even after getting help, so I've come here starting from scratch.




Moving would be really hard right now:
- Mackenzie getting out to apartment or house-hunt, shop for moving supplies, etc. would put her at risk for COVID—our county is currently having one of the highest spikes in the world.
- Our state is also one of the most popular states people are moving to right now, making the rental market extremely competitive and rentals have had a sudden hike in prices. It would cost more than a mortgage for this house to rent somewhere.
- Finding an apartment or house big enough for four grown people is hard to begin with, even without those problems.
- Both my mother and I have health issues that put limitations on the amount of labor we can do; moving would be a strain and a risk.
- The news of the move hit Quintin extremely hard; he was already anxious and depressed from the mess of 2020, and this has only made things worse. He breaks into tears a lot and has outbursts, and he’s regressing since getting the news.
- Ben the dog is a mixed breed and looks like he's part pitbull; they’ve had crack downs, and most landlords won’t even consider taking him in even though he's extremely sweet-tempered. He’s 12 years old now; we’ve had him over 11 years, and we can’t bear to give him away in his old age.
- The move would require us all to take time away from work to plan and prepare, giving us even more financial issues down the line
- A move would require a lot of money for packing, a truck, down payment, security, pet fees, etc.—all money that could have gone to debts or down payments.
- We love this house; it’s perfect for us and leaving it would be heartbreaking

A down payment could save us.



We knew the owners planned to sell eventually, but we were given the impression we had more time (like another year or two). We've been working to get things in order so we could buy it at that point, but now we have this rush.

We pay our bills; credit card debt from lawyers, moves, and medical issues are still being paid down but have been managed. Credit scores are not stellar, but not bad, either. But our chances are slim right now without a decent down payment because of 2020 work instability and income-to-debt ratio.

We're all doing whatever we can and working whatever hours we can get to save money. My other brother, Griffin, has had a steady job through most of this, but most of his money goes towards our monthly rent and bills already. Mackenzie found an online job and she’s selling every she can find that’s worth something—the few pieces of jewelry we have (not worth tons but are family heirlooms for the most part), my grandmother’s good wedding china, etc. We are waiting on the landlord's real estate agents to tell us their asking price this week. A friend who works in real estate is giving us advice and helping guide us to maximize our chances, but in the end, it's all resting on the down payment and how fast we can get it.

The amount we have here is based on what the house should be worth at most, but the more we can get, the better our chances. If we can’t buy this house, we at least hope to buy a house, so that we won’t have to go through this again in a couple of years. Things have been tough for too long, and it’s taken its toll on us all both physically and emotionally. We all need to settle down and feel secure, like we’re not going to have the rug pulled out from under us at any time.

Every cent of help we can get will go towards the down payment on this house in the best case scenario where we get to stay here. If we can't, it will go towards down payments on another house in the area we can get a mortgage for, if we can find any, and moving fees. Any help at all we can get is appreciated from the bottom of our hearts.