Ryan Ginstrom and fj.life.in-japan is a baaaaaaaaaaad combination:

>Well, the final word on the loan came through yesterday, so I guess it's
>official. We now own a house in Japan.

Welcome home, is the phrase I should use. 

>We had been thinking of a few options on how to buy a house. We thought
>about buying a really cheap place with cash, or getting permanent residence
>for me. In the end, we had my wife apply for the loan. To prepare, I've been
>paying her a "salary" out of my income for a few years.
>
>Interestingly, I am the joint guarantor on the loan, and have half the house
>in my name. It seems like you just need the Japanese citizenship/perm
>residence to get things rolling, after that they don't care who the hell
>pays for it.

Yup. I went through this in 1999, although under more stressful circumstances
(my future wife's house burned down). Since everything was destroyed, we had to
procure enough funds to pay for the house *and* all furniture and appliances
inside; I eventually went with getting half the money from a bank and the other
half from the 住宅金融公庫. I ended up getting 3,000,000 yen in this fashion,
and it was barely enough (we had to pay property taxes upon changing the
ownership of the land, too... fuckers).

As it turns out, I was the only one in the entire family who was qualified to
get a loan at all, so it's all in my name with my wife as guarantor. The house
ended up being something like 99.4% in my name or something like that.

>Right now interest is dirt cheap -- our rate is 1.975%. It's variable
>though -- we decided against fixed because a fixed 10-year interest rate was
>higher than the variable rate has been in years.
>
>The house itself is pretty cool. It's on a kind of slope, with the ocean
>below. It's on 140-odd tsubo of land, and the house takes up a fair part of
>it. View of the ocean is 180 degrees, and it's really very pretty. I've
>already got the spot for my hammock picked out.

Have fun planting grass. I spent all summer tending the yard... next summer
it'll be juuuuuuust right for holding barbeques.

Are you going to take pics of you and your wife jumping up and down in front of
it, like Debito did?



-- 
The 2-Belo
the2belo[AT]msd[DOT]biglobe[DOT]ne[DOT]jp
news:alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk (mhm21x20)
news:alt.fan.karl-malden.nose            (Meow.)
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