11 Percent for 5 Months — I'd Sign That $38,000 Bridge Again

Eleven percent. I signed for it at 12:50 on a February afternoon in a title office off Sunrise Boulevard in Sacramento, one clipboard, two ballpoints, and a bridge note for $38,000 secured by a condominium in Denver I had not seen since November. Two sets of keys sat on the dashboard of my wagon outside, one for a house I owned and one for a house I had just bought. Only one of 'em opened anything yet.

The Sacramento house was $472,000 under contract, 24 offers deep, and the listing agent had said the words no contingencies out loud at the open house while three couples wrote offers on the hood of her car. My hospital job in Roseville began March 9. The Denver condo had been listed since November 8 at $415,000, cut to $399,000 on December 12, with two offers under it at $365,000 and $372,000. I needed $38,000 of down payment that my own equity would provide, eventually, to somebody, at some price.

The bridge looked like panic borrowing, 11% against a 6.75% mortgage rate and a 4.1% savings rate. The math went the other way, and I ran it four times before signing: the entire bridge, worst case, would cost about as much as two months of my Denver vacancy. Against a contingent offer, it was not close.

62 days and zero acceptable offers

Denver numbers, for the record: listed November 8 at $415,000, price cut December 12 to $399,000, HOA $386 a month the entire time, mortgage $1,612, insurance $94. Two offers total, both lowballs, both declined on advice that was easy to take. Vacant condos in that building had been moving inside 40 days for the three years before mine. Mine sat 62 and counting when the Sacramento job offer turned the problem from annoying to structural.

the listing that said no contingencies

The Sacramento listing went up on a Thursday and had 24 offers by Sunday, per the listing agent, several of them contingent on delayed sales like mine would have been. Her instruction from the seller was blunt: sale-contingent offers needed to come in $12,000 stronger than the rest of the field to even get reviewed. I bid $474,000 over a $459,000 list, no sale contingency, appraisal gap covered to $8,000. Accepted Monday mornin'. The clock began with my equity still 900 miles east in a condo nobody wanted at my number.

what the credit union offered

My Denver credit union, the one I have banked with since 2011, had a product for exactly this: a bridge note secured by the condo's equity, capped at 80% combined loan-to-value across both properties. Terms on the sheet: 11% interest-only, six-month maximum term, origination $795, administration $197, recording and review $150. Interest on $38,000 ran $348 a month. My plan said five months, the term sheet said six, and the Denver market ended up settling the argument in four.

the two-house month

April was the expensive one, and I kept the ledger in a spiral notebook cuz the month needed a paper trail: Denver mortgage $1,612, Denver HOA $386, Sacramento principal, interest, taxes, and insurance $2,687, bridge interest $348, storage units in two states $283, gas for the corridor drive $210. One salary, $5,526 of housing burn, and a savings buffer that fell from $31,000 to $24,400 before the condo moved. I ate lunch at the hospital cafeteria every day that month. The salad bar is $8.79 and I have opinions about it now.

the corridor drive, four times

Between January and May I drove the Denver-to-Sacramento corridor four times, 1,200 miles each way, with a carload each trip: January the documents, March the dog and the good knives, April the tools, May whatever was left. The $210 gas line in the ledger was for one trip; all four together, with two motel nights each, ran closer to $1,400. The bridge note never cited any of this. Neither does anyone's bridge math, including mine, the first time I ran it.

the math against a contingent offer

Bridge ledger, all in: $1,393 of interest across four months, $1,142 of fees, and a $1,050 rate-lock extension when my Denver buyer's lender slipped three weeks. Total $3,585 to hold two houses instead of one. The contingent route, priced by the listing agent's own rule, began at $12,000 of extra offer, added a 45-day close I could not have guaranteed, and still left me paying Sacramento rent while the Denver sale crawled, call it $3,100 of double-living costs. $3,585 against $15,100, measured against a house 23 other bidders wanted. The 11% was the cheapest money I was offered all year, once cheap is defined honestly.

month four, the Denver closing

The condo sold May 28 at $401,500, $2,500 over the second list price, to a buyer whose agent apologized twice about her lender. Payoff wired June 2: $348,200 to the mortgage, $38,000 plus $1,393 of accrued interest to the credit union, done. Their lien release posted June 5. The Sacramento house appraised at $471,000 against my $474,000 contract, which burned $3,000 of the $8,000 gap I had promised, in cash, from the same shrinking buffer. Nobody mentions that part of a no-contingency win at barbecues.

the clipboard note

The term sheet from February lives in my desk drawer with the 12:50 signing time printed on it and the 11% circled in my own handwriting, which felt criminal that afternoon and reads like a bargain from June. One wagon, one house, both keys working. Total cost of the bridge and its complications: $3,585. Total cost of waiting politely for Denver: a house, a job start, and about $11,500 more than I paid. I would sign it again in the same parking lot.