Help the Radcliffes get into a house

The Background

Since Larisa and I sold our house in 2018 and moved to Germany, we have been hoping to own a home again one day. We have been saving what we could along the way, enabled partly because we are living in a very budget friendly place now. It has been a huge blessing with wonderful neighbors, but living out of 1 bathroom is a tension point we are hoping to move beyond. This year for the first time, it seemed like a realistic possibility from a finance perspective. As we started looking though, we couldn't find any homes the right size for our family in our small town. We thought we had one promising lead, but our mortgage guy informed us it would take upwards of a hundred thousand Euros to remove the asbestos that was in that home. 😱

We weren't sure whether the lack of options was a door closing, or a redirection, so we resigned ourselves to having more patience and waiting for more direction. Then, in January this year, some life circumstances changed our plans for us. There is a dear family to us and fellow missionaries who suffered the loss of their wife and mother, Sarah. We are the guardians for their 3 kids. This is a responsibility we take seriously, and we began right away to plan ways to shape our lives around supporting this family. Right away, this looked like 3 trips to London in 5 weeks to help in the initial crisis, and plan and put on the funeral. All this has caused us to plan for getting a property which can fit more people, as we want to be able to spend time with this family in a meaninful way.

The Target

This new perspective has led us to a house here in Kandern that we think fits all of our needs in a very cool way. It is comprised of one main house, with a few different sections in seperate areas. There is a top floor 2 bedroom apartment, and a studio apartment on the lowest level. This would give us the flexibility to have friends and family come to stay with us, and when the space isn’t needed for that, we plan to open a missionary housing option to serve the community for families coming by to visit their students at Black Forest Academy. This has been a long term need that we are excited to play a role in filling! The end goal would be to have a consistant renter in the bottom floor apartment to help offset the ongoing costs, and a low cost temporary housing option for missionaries in the bigger space on the top floor.

The Need

Real Estate in Germany is a little different in the States. We have been learning a lot. One of the main differences, is that there are many more fees and taxes to pay up front when you buy a property. As this house we are looking at is bigger, we also need to put up a little more up front. We estimate that we need about $110,000 up front to get this house. This is what we need help for, as our savings were only about half that amount. Would you please join with us and help us in this journey of planting these roots in Kandern to serve the Black Forest Academy community in this way? We would love to chat in person to share photos and more details.