I was about to set my alarm clock for tomorrow morning when I realized — wait a minute — I don’t have to go to work tomorrow. Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln! HA-ha! So tomorrow, whenever I get up, I’ll do some laundry. Then I have a 3pm appointment at Glen Ivy Day Spa for an 80-minute massage, courtesy Mr. W and my court reporter. My reporter had given me a gift e-certificate for Christmas, but I was so busy I never used it. Then a few days ago, I got another e-certificate from Mr. W for Valentine’s Day. His gift was so generous that I think I’ll have to split it up into two sessions. Upon receipt, I’d emailed him immediately to thank him, and to tell him to stop wasting our wedding money. I was joking. Partially.

Speaking of money, Mr. W and I went to our realtor’s office after work today and signed our house offer papers. And then we stayed and discussed our finances with him for an hour, figuring out ways to make ourselves more appealing to the bank for mortgage loans. The bank’s current formulas for risk assessment sucks. The crappy California housing market is making loans so hard to get; lenders are getting crazy conservative. By that, I mean stingy and paranoid. But we’re still in a pretty good situation to appear attractive to lenders. Jumbo loans are considered anything $417K and up, and those have higher interest rates, which is ridiculous cuz you can’t even get townhomes for under that price in Southern California these days (unless you’re going into seriously questionable neighborhoods with resale values inversely proportional to the probability that you’ll get shot living there). Luckily, it looks like an “economic stimulus package” bill is newly passed that increases the definition of a jumbo loan, just temporarily, to the neighborhood of the $700Ks. That means we’ll be able to get a higher loan for a decent house and pay a lower interest rate if we buy property this year. (If you read the article I linked to, it criticizes the effectiveness of this bill in warding off a recession, and claims it only helps certain people in certain financial situations in specific housing markets, and those people and situations listed includes us. And if the bill doesn’t stop the housing market from its continual slide downhill, well, then that’s just more affordable inventory for us to pick from.) What a stroke of luck! Interest rates are also about to drop again in a month. Housing prices are still spiraling downward as sellers get more desperate. This is the perfect time to buy. “It looks like everything is lining up perfectly for us,” Mr. W observed happily tonight during a dinner of Thai food. I reminded him that I’d told him last year that my finances always line themselves up magically, and that since he was going to be with me, his finances would line up, too, as a necessity by proxy. And maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that when we walked into my realtor’s office, the first person I ran into was Grace’s dad (also a realtor). I had no idea he worked with that company, and my realtor told me that he’s been there for about 2-3 years, which is approximately the period of time that I’d lost touch with Grace’s parents. It’s almost like Grace is sending her hello to me, letting me know that she’s watching over me and not to worry about finances, things will fall into place. I’d also gotten two other positive signs about finances in the past few days. One, I was balancing my checkbook, and for the first time that I can remember, it balanced out exactly between my checkbook register and the bank statement without my having to make adjustments to account for things that either haven’t processed or that I forgot to account for. Two, I was reconciling my receipts with my credit card bill and for the first time ever, I accounted for every receipt in my room without leftover receipts that didn’t show up on this billing cycle, and without receipts I still need to retrieve from my wallet downstairs.

I know this is way too much boring personal financial information, and it doesn’t mean anything to anyone except that I appear to be incredibly anal in accounting for my finances, but it means something to me as far as signs go. So I’ll just take it as that, that I’m being told celestially that I’ll be okay.