Almost immediately on our return home, life kicked into high gear. I had arthroscopic surgery for a torn meniscus, we were showing our house and hoping to receive an offer on it, and all the documentation required to buy the Anghiari house needed to be completed. I was inundated with paperwork and other tedious, sometimes stressful, tasks that resulted from setting our adventure into motion. At the same time that we were both selling and buying a house, we also began to prepare to apply for an Italian Elective Residency visa. Any one of these alone can dominate a person’s life; all three together are guaranteed to lead to sleepless nights. To look on the bright side, those sleepless nights provide a few extra, and much needed, hours in the day.
Beginning in December, before our house in Fernandina had been officially listed, a few people asked to see the house and we hoped for a quick and easy sale. When none of those viewings led to an offer, we began showing the house on a regular basis. Anyone who has put their house on the market knows the drill: declutter, remove personal objects, and make every surface shine. Present a house unmarked by the owners’ personality so that viewers can imagine themselves in it. Regardless of our efforts, we didn’t expect to make a profit or even recoup what we had spent on the house. We had lived there only two years, not enough time to see a substantial increase in housing values. Selling for approximately the amount you paid is a net loss given the cost of any improvements, repairs, taxes, insurance and won’t begin to cover the realtor’s commission.
As we proceeded with showing the house, I also began to provide the documentation required for our Italian purchase. As mentioned earlier, I had owned a property in Paris and the purchasing process was a cake walk compared to buying a house in Italy. To start with, in order to do any kind of business in Italy, one must have a codice fiscale, an assigned national code similar to a social security number. I had applied for it the previous fall as soon as we became certain of our plans, filling out the application form with my legal name, Margaret Birney. Before long, I was notified that the codice required my birth name, not my married name. Although a bit concerned that my legal name and my codice fiscale name would not match, I sent in a new application, using my maiden name. Unlike almost everything else I was to experience, my number then arrived promptly and without further complications. Terry already had a codice fiscale, acquired during his student years in Italy, so now we both had this basic requirement.
But, my name on the Preliminary Contract for the Anghiari house was Margaret Birney. Marta, with whom I was now working at the Romolini agency, needed my marriage license to verify that I had married and taken my husband’s name. In Italy, a female’s surname does not change when marrying so I understood Marta’s request for this extra step even if it seemed like a nuisance. Now I needed to send for a certified copy of my marriage license from the records office in the county where I married. I mailed the required application and waited, hoping for a quick turn around so that the process in Italy could go forward. Time passed and my license hadn’t arrived so I called the office to find out whether it had been mailed. No one answered, and it was a Thursday–why wouldn’t a government office be open on a weekday? I left a message, uncertain if it would be received and wondering what had happened to that office. As it turned out, a major snow storm was what happened and the employees didn’t come in to work that day. With apologies, a woman called me back a day later to let me know that the document was on its way.
With my name situation resolved, the signing of the Preliminary Contract could proceed. This contract is comparable to a Buy Sell Agreement in America, designating the agreed upon sales price and down payment amount along with a closing date and signatures of the buyer and seller. Written in both Italian and English, it was a multi-page document with each page to be signed by the buyers and the seller. While this may seem straight forward, there were, nevertheless, a series of problems that frustrated both Marta and myself. First, a few corrections needed to be made–simple enough. After all the details were corrected, we received, via an email attachment, a copy of the Preliminary Contract with instructions to print two copies. Each page of both copies had to be signed in the right margin, except for the last page, which was to be signed at the bottom. One copy we had to scan to email and send to Marta. Since my printer had refused to do the job, this and other tasks led to numerous trips to Staples to send materials from there. The other copy we were to send to Marta by courier and, mea culpa, I sent a photocopy of the contract rather than the one with our original signatures. That sent Marta into a bit of a tailspin because she was required to register it by a certain date and would now have to wait for the correct copy to arrive.
Now we needed to send money to cover the down payment, which would be deposited in an account of the notaio doing the legal work for our purchase. For this first payment, we simply headed to the local bank to make the transfer. It was the last time we would send money that way, having already decided to use a currency exchange company for the balance of the payments. The advantage of using such a service is that it locks in an exchange rate , hopefully a good one, which will apply each time you have to send money. Moreover, banks do charge more for transferring money and, as we found out, an intermediary bank steps in to charge an extra fee as it passes through their system. Though I had requested that all fees be charged to me, this one was taken from the amount to be deposited in the notaio’s account and so was short some Euros. Marta was not happy, but said not to worry, it would be adjusted at some later point.
On the same day that I was reading, copying and signing papers for the house purchase in Italy, we received an offer on our home in Fernandina. It was our first offer and lower than we wanted, or, in our opinion, should be able to expect. However, conventional wisdom purports that the first offer is usually the best one and turning it down might lead to serious regret. After mulling over the offer, I called our realtor to ask if she thought conventional wisdom had it right and she affirmed that in most cases it did. We then countered with a higher price and received another, still low, offer from the prospective buyers. That evening, Terry and I talked it over and decided to accept the last offer, though not happily on my part. Still, the amount was greater than the cost of the house in Anghiari so we resigned ourselves to a less than optimal sale. Imagine our mood, though, when an offer for significantly more arrived almost immediately. And two other couples expressed to us their disappointment at losing the house, for which they had been willing to pay close to the listed price.
With the fever pitch of buying and selling at the same time now abating, it was time to work through the application process for a visa that would allow us to stay in Italy for longer than the three months allowed for tourists. A subject for another post.
Lurching towards Italy 