Are you ready for a text-heavy post? Buckle in, my friends.
I've been toying with the idea of buying a house for at least a year now. Ever since the housing crash, interest rates have been excellent and house prices have been lower than usual. So when it came time for us to think about renewing our rental contract for another year, I started weighing the options.
I began by looking at how much it would cost to rent a 3 bedroom house. We only have 2 bedrooms where we are now, and we knew that if we wanted to have another baby that we'd want another room so that we and Little Brown didn't have to share with a baby. So it had to be 3 bedrooms. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, but to rent a decent 3 bedroom apartment costs $1100+ per month. I couldn't help but look at that number and think, "That's a mortgage payment!"
Once I knew renting would be quite costly, I decided it was time to start doing some serious research into buying a house. I started estimating a budget and looking around on housing websites seeing what we could get for what I predicted we could afford.
I was optimistic, but the prospect of buying a house seemed daunting to me. For whatever reason, it seemed like buying a house was a bigger deal than having a child. How backward is that? It's probably the prospect of being in debt for such a long time. Blue and I have only been in debt once, and it was for such a short amount of time that it didn't feel like it at all. The idea of owing over a thousand dollars to a bank every month for 30 years seems crazy to me. Throw in the uncertainty that is Blue's job at a start-up company and it really gets you worried.
Despite all my misgivings, the low interest rates were just too enticing. I was more worried that if we waited another year to buy, we'd face higher interest rates and more expensive houses, severely limiting what we'd be able to afford. Now seemed like as good a time as any.
So we began the process. We got pre-approved by a lender. (Side note: it's scary how much they were willing to lend us. They were willing to lend us $100,000 more than I thought we'd need. It's no wonder the housing market crashed!) We found a realtor, even though I wasn't sure I really wanted one, given our interest in building a house. But it seemed too daunting to buy our first house on our own. I went through our hot sheet and picked out a few existing houses that I liked.
We looked at one existing house, and we talked to Ivory Homes. The existing house seemed small and wasn't in a very good location, but the Ivory Homes lots were in a close-to-perfect location. The only downside was that Ivory was at the top end of our budget, and they were putting on a lot of pressure to sign a contract now, due to diminishing incentives with each sold lot. We drove around the neighborhood and I felt good about it, but it seemed strange that we were thinking about buying a home so quickly. I thought the process would take months and months to find our house, not a few days!
We decided to sign with Ivory, because it would lock in the pricing and incentives but would still give us a week to make a final decision before we lost any earnest money. Thus began the week of doom.
To be continued in The Great House Hunt, Part 2: The Week of Doom
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