In early 2011, my wife (fiancee at the time) and I decided to move into a house. We couldn't really buy because we each had pretty nasty credit, so we looked at renting. Then we found one of those lease to own deals. The way it worked is, we contracted with a company to let us move into the house while we work with another company to improve our credit. So, in March of 2011 we moved in. It should have only taken 9 to 12 months, but I couldn't get my credit scores up high enough. I realized too late that I wasn't paying enough on one of my revolving accounts - by only paying the minimum due each month, I was only paying the interest and not bringing the balance down. So, we extended the lease for another 6 months.

In late September of this year, we started working with a mortgage company and things went pretty smooth. We got all the paperwork done and turned in, the seller sent us the original survey, we decided on an insurance company, and we got the appraisal done. And that is where we hit a snag. The house appraised for 132,000.00 but the seller is asking 148,220.00. The mortgage company has been appealing the appraisal - the seller has a realtor friend pulling lists of recent house sales in our area and he's sending them to the mortgage company - but I'm not sure if that is going to work.

Part of the lease to own deal is that during the purchase, we get a 4000.00 credit for the "down payment" we had to give the lease company to move in, and 4320.00 in rent credits (360.00 of the 1200.00 a month we've been paying in rent - for just the 12 months of the original contract, not counting the extension). If we can't buy the house because either we can't get the appraisal up or the seller won't come down on the price, then we loose all that. Granted, I've been throwing away money for the past 12 to 13 years living in apartments, but I still don't like it.

Plus, if we can't buy the house and we have to move out, than we'll probably have to move into a rent house. Even though we've been able to raise our credit scores, we don't really have the money for a down payment and closing costs and all that. The credits we were going to get from the lease company and the seller would have covered most of all that so we were only looking at bring 1500.00 to 2000.00 to the closing.

This is very stressful.