Kyle Hepp

March 23, 2010

Quick, before I forget — I donated the rest of the money from the prints purchased to houses being built in Colchagua. So you know I’m not lying, you can go see my intitials on their official donation spreadsheet here. Thanks again to everyone who helped raise money! Grand total of money donated for the Teleton and this was about $1500. Amazing.

Because I’ve been so busy posting too many amazing weddings to even keep track of, I’ve sort of neglected talking much about what else is going on in our life. Because yes, believe it or not, we do have a life outside photography.

Aside from taking pictures of pretty people in cemeteries and elsewhere, we also have been trying to buy an apartment. Not an easy feat. As anyone who lives in Santiago knows, you cannot pay people in Chile to get things done. They have to do it all on their own time. But we did actually find an apartment or two that we are going to buy. One of them, the owner of the apartment died, right before we signed the agreement to buy. Mala cuea. It could take up to 3 months now before the deed of the property is put into the name of the new owner, which is complicated because of crazy Chilean inheritance laws. And obviously we can’t buy until that’s all straightened out because we would very much like to make sure that this is legally ours once we pay for it!

And then we were denied for a loan on the other apartment, and are currently in the process of re-applying with Seba’s parents as co-signers. It’s a little frustrating to feel like even though we are running a successful business and still have a huge emergency fund chunk of savings in the bank, that isn’t financially responsible enough to be approved for a mortgage. We thought they would take the average of the past year’s boletas (receipts, or basically the Chilean way of verifying income if you’re self employed). But instead of taking the average, they said, “You made $5,000 in the month of December, but in the month of January you made $500. Your income fluctuates too much. We can’t approve you.” Our income does fluctuate a lot since we function on deposits when the couple books and then the payment of the final balance the month of the wedding. And some months we obviously get more bookings or have more weddings paying their final deposits. But I psychotically budget out our lives on my crazy spreadsheets. I could tell you down to the peso OR penny (my spreadsheets calculates in U.S. dollars and Chilean pesos and all I have to do is plug the exchange rate in for it to re-calculate) how much money we will have in December of this year. Once we do get an apartment and figure out our new expenses I’ll start budgeting out beyond that. The bank doesn’t care. So even though we hated having to be dependent on the good ol’ ‘rents, we went to them to co-sign our loan. Fortunately Seba’s parents are the real estate sharks of Estacion Central so we should get approved this time around. We find out soon, and I’m nervous!

But, even if our loan comes through, there are still so many other variables. The guy in the second apartment isn’t going to sign the agreement to sell until he finds a place to buy. Then once we buy it, we want to do a complete remodeling.

Realistically, I’m thinking we probably won’t move in until the end of the year. When we moved back in with Seba’s parents in October when we got back from Europe, we thought it would be 2-3 months before we found an apartment to buy and moved in. Reality check aaaaaaaaand MARK. Silly me, thinking anything in Chile would be uncomplicated and not time consuming