The Story Gets Better: Lady Trades $96k House for $5-8.5K Car

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LaWanda Flake gets our lady of the day award (if we had such a thing) for this clever act of charity. LaWanda had a four bedroom house in need of repair but valued at $96,000, which she had purchased at foreclosure last year for $3.6k. But what she really needed was a minivan capable of handling her kids, her disability, and getting to school and back when the buses were being unreliable.

What did the single mother of six do? She traded her used house for a used car. But not to just anybody.

From Yahoo:

“I had a lot of good offers, some from out of state. It turned out I took one of the first offers I got because I felt like it helped us both,” Flake told the Detroit News. “They needed the house more than anyone I spoke with. They kept telling me it was a blessing to them. I really feel like I made a good decision.”

Now, don’t worry. Flake and her kids have relocated to a “a three-bedroom home nearby that she was able to purchase on a $4,000 land contract,” and the current owners of her old house took in trade knowing that they would have to replace the furnace and water heater, and do other repairs around the place. According to Yahoo, other offers she received included a $20k Bentley and a 1996 Corvette, both valuable cars, but ones that didn’t suit her needs.

The fact that she took the opportunity to, within her means, make sure that both families participating in the swap got something that they really needed is an example we could all follow.

(via Yahoo News.)


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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.