u/AngelicaSadness

Hi All! Hoping to get some advice here. My wife's grandparents purchased a beach townhouse back in 1991 - it's a 1,300 square foot 3 bed room 2.5 bath in good condition but not renovated (just new kitchen cabinets and carpet) valued at 1.4mil on zillow right now. It's about a block and a half from the beach in Avalon, NJ and due to health reasons, they are planning to sell it after this summer season.

They offered selling the house to each of their children (at a discount, thought we don't know the specifics) but all three turned them down. My wife's parents live the closest and use it the most, but they're very risk averse, plus we're pretty sure they would instead like to buy a place near my wife's brother in Chicago so they have a residence near both kids/their grandkids.

Here is my question. My wife and I live about an hour away and would love to keep the house in the family. We're trying to brainstorm if it's possible for us to buy the house from her grandparents (gifting/trusts is not an option - her grandparents are extremely strict about equity between their kids and grandkids and have stated that at most, each grandkid would get 50k as an inheritance with the rest divided equally between their kids and charity (mostly charity)).

Our situation - we own/mortgage our current home (purchased for 430k with 20% down in Jan 2022 with a 2.95 interest rate). Payment is 2,400 a month. Outside of retirement/kids college savings that we'd rather not touch, we could spare about 100k for a down payment but paying a second mortgage isn't feasible right now because we have three kids under three in daycare. We make a combines $240k a year.

We're wondering if we could break even essentially by renting out the place during the summer. We'd likely need to use a property management company which I know can be expensive, plus maintenance, property and rental income taxes will be steep.

My parents are fairly wealthy and I think might be willing to loan us some money (for context, they have helped us with gifts before and live in a $5mill home in Florida with little to no debt - my dad is a retired executive).

We love the beach and visit with her grandparent multiple times a summer and they let us use it in the off/winter months just for a place to get away with the kids. We're generally pretty conservative with our money but we know the chance of getting back in once a house it sold at the shore is just not feasible so I'm just here looking to get any thoughts you guys have/advice. We think her grandparents would be thrilled to keep it in the family, but don't want to go to them/ask without a feasible plan.

Thank you in advance for any advice/help!

Hi All - hoping someone here has some insight. I'm getting solar panels, but ACE just came back (to the solar company we're working with) and said that they have to remove two panels from the design. ACE said based on our usage, the max system size was 10.88. Our roof can accommodate as 12.2 size system and we use about 13,000 kwh per year. Based on my math and our ACE statements, our total rolling 12 month usage was 13,061 kwh and ACE is dividing that by 1,200 to get the 10.88.

They are not claiming anything about the grid not being able to handle the larger system - they're essentially just saying, this is how we calculate it and thems the breaks.

Is there anyway for me to contest this? Ultimately I think some panels are better than none, but I'm generally just annoyed that unless we significantly decrease our usage, I'm going to have to pay ACE for the difference.