Heating and cooling should be supplied by one or more large filthy objects squatting in a basement or closet. You should inspect these objects from a safe distance; you should also find out what the total annual heating and cooling costs will be, using the following formula:

1. Ask the person selling the house how much the total annual heating and cooling cost will be.

2. To determine the actual cost, multiply the amount this person gives you by the weight, in pounds, of the devices supplying the heating and cooling.

Make no mistake about it: there will be insects in the house. The entire planet is teeming with insect life; scientists now estimate that there are over 60,000,000,000,000,000,000 different species living under my kitchen sink alone.

Fortunately, most insects pose no threat to homeowners. All they want is to eat your food and have babies in your sock drawer and maybe crawl up your nostril while you’re sleeping. In exchange for this, many of them gladly perform useful household services, such as pooping on your toothbrush. “You scratch my back, and I’ll suck blood out of yours”that is the insect motto.

The exception, of course, is termites, which are small socialist insects that eat houses. (We don’t know what they ate before houses were invented. We think maybe garages.) Termites live in large colonies ruled by a lady termite with an enormous butt, called the Queen, who governs over a strict termite hierarchy consisting of: the Biters, the Chewers, the Spit Makers, the Soldiers, the House of Commons, the Nannies, and the Cute Little Baby Eggs. Each of these colony members has specific duties and responsibilities that are clearly posted on the Bulletin Board, although of course, being insects, they are much too stupid to remember what these duties and responsibilities are, so they basically just scurry around at random. Nevertheless, as I noted earlier, they can eat your prospective house, so it is very important that you inspect carefully for the Two Telltale Signs of Termite Infestation, which are:

1. Termites walking around with pieces of your prospective house in their mouths

2. No sign whatsoever of termites, because they are hiding

If all the items on this checklist check out to your satisfaction, it’s time to make the standard Insulting Opening Offer on the house, which we’ll cover in our next chapter.

If you want to come out a winner in the negotiations for your new house, you have to be tough. “This is not a time for human decency,” are the words of Wayne Savage, the internationally renowned lecturer and author of the best-selling book on negotiating strategy, Leave Them Bleeding in the Dirt, which retails for $178.63 and not a penny less. Which is why you need to know:

A fine example of the kind of negotiating approach you should take can be found in the excellent corporate training film The Godfather, where, as part of his negotiations with a movie producer, Marlon Brando gains a subtle psychological advantage by arranging to have the producer wake up in bed next to the head of a deceased horse. (It could have been worse; it could have been Marlon Brando.)

This is not to suggest that to get a good price on a house, you need to go around decapitating domesticated animals. No indeed; wild animals are more than adequate for most residential transactions. But the point is, you have to be firm.

At the outset of your negotiations, it is very important to create the impression that you don’t really want to buy the house at all, that in fact you hate the house, and the mere thought of it makes you physically ill. Your opening offer should convey this. It should be worded as follows: “We don’t want your house, so we will give you X number of dollars for it, including all major appliances and the children.” (Note that you should not name a specific amount. You should actually use the term “X number of dollars,” so as to avoid tipping your hand.) The broker will take your offer to the seller, who at this point has a number of options, such as:

1. He can accept your offer.

2. He can reject your offer.

3. He can give back the dinette set, the pool table, AND the Epcot Center vacation in exchange for whatever is behind curtain number two.

Another possibility is that he will make a counteroffer, which your broker will bring back for you to consider. “We don’t want to sell the house,” it might say. “We only put it on the market because we enjoy having total strangers come around and test-flush all our toilets. But we are willing to let it go for Y number of dollars, plus you can have little Deirdre, provided you raise her in a religious environment. We get the microwave.”

And then you send the broker back with another offer, and they send you another counteroffer, and so on until the broker, his fingers bloodied from typing up the various negotiating positions, drops dead in the street from exhaustion, which is the signal for the buyer and the seller to settle on a price equal to the original asking price minus about five percent. This is the price that everybody always winds up at, and if we all just agreed on it at the beginning, there would be a lot less hassle and inconvenience in the form of dead brokers. But we have to ask ourselves if this would really be such a desirable outcome.

In any event, now that you and the seller have set a price, you need to sign the agreement of sale, which should be worded in standard legal terminology, as follows:

WHEREAS the Seller wants to sell, and the Buyer wants to buy, and they think they got a price that’s not too low or too high; and the Buyer gave the Seller a down payment to hold, now he’ll try to get a mortgage ‘fore they BOTH grow old; and the Seller’s gonna see if he got termites in his place

‘cause if he does, the Buyer’s gonna tear it right up in his face; but if everything is cool and nobody’s late, then the deal will go down on the Settlement Date.

CHORUS

Oooh baby baby We gon’ have a transaction tonight

Of course I realize you probably don’t understand some of this “legal jargon,” but this is only because you are stupid. This is why it’s important to ask several lawyers to give you contradictory advice before you sign anything, including get-well cards.

Meanwhile, however, it is time to go around to some banks and see if you can find one foolish enough to lend you some money.