Homeowners’ Past Decision Pays Off

In December, 1969, Bud and Connie Beasley thought $38,000 was a lot to spend on a new home, but with loans from their folks and the bank they took the plunge.

Their three-bedroom home was recently appraised at $160,000, which the appraiser said was lower than its real value but easily enough to get them a new $20,000 loan to remodel the kitchen and dining room and have a bit left over.

For the Beasleys and other longtime homeowners, the American dream is alive and well.

They have no plans to sell their home, no plans to move. The equity in their house is not so much a gold mine toward a better home as a rich vein to tap to create the house of their dreams.

An earlier $17,000 loan went to fix up their master bedroom with dusty rose carpeting, rich wallpaper and a pink-marble fireplace in the corner. Off the bedroom is a hot tub and a pool.

‘I’m Not Moving’

“I love it,” Connie says of the house. “And I’m not moving until they take me out in a pine box.”

The couple’s monthly payment on their original mortgage is $258, which includes principal and interest on the $5,000 balance, taxes, conventional insurance, earthquake insurance and a rider covering their antiques.

But for their daughter Michelle St. John, 26, married and pregnant with the family’s first child and first grandchild, the Beasleys’ fortune is the St. Johns’ crisis.

She and her husband Judd are finding it it difficult to save for a house, especially with a baby on the way.

“It just enrages me--even in a one-bedroom apartment, you pay three times the rent they pay for a house payment,” she said.

To buy their house in 1969, the Beasleys borrowed $10,000 from their parents to help come up with a down payment.

Financial Sacrifice

Bud, 56, in agricultural test management at UC Riverside, was without tenure at the time. Connie, 52, now executive director of the Children’s Center, a school for infants and toddlers with disabilities, wasn’t making much money at her job. They had yet to sell the home in South Pasadena where they had lived before the move.

But when they saw the Malvern Way house on a rare day of pouring rain, they decided to make the financial sacrifice needed.