Buying a House (Caution: A LONG POST)

In mid February I decided that I should look into buying a house. Not because I had saved up enough money for a down payment or because I really wanted to own my own house. I simply started to look into it because it was cheaper then renting and my lease would be up at the end of May. Little did I know that buying your own house is kind of a pain in the ass. As a first time home owner you really don't know what to expect from the whole process. It is strange and scary and the rules seem to change from day to day. My best advice is to get a good Realtor and let them do most of the work.

When I started to look at houses I approached it much the same way I had in the past when looking for apartments. I looked in the paper and set up RSS feeds from craigslist ads as well as looking at google maps real estate listings. It was a lot of work but I was looking for a place to live damn it. It turns out that you don't need to do any of this stuff. A good Realtor does all of that for you. I say "good Realtor" because my first Realtor did none of those things. In fact when I asked for information on a house I found through my various searches, it would be weeks before I heard back from the guy. So I fired that guy and got a new Realtor who found us the perfect house in a matter of hours. The End

If it was that simple everyone would own houses. Sadly it is not.

Now that I had a good Realtor I would get dozens of listings for houses in my price range a few times a week. Now seeing 40 or 50 houses on a list is a bit intimidating. I narrowed down the list by just asking to see the houses in the areas of town we wanted to live in. I think in total we looked at about 20 houses before we saw one that was pretty cool. So I decided to place an offer on the house and that was when the real fun started.

You place an offer on a house that is lower than the asking price but not low enough for them to just say 'no' to you outright. You add a bunch of stuff to the offer that you can drop out later during negotiations of a sale price. You finally sign a bunch of stuff and wait to hear back. This is a nerve racking/exciting waiting game that sometimes goes on for too long. Our first two offers were out bid by higher bidders. So it was back to looking at houses. We saw about 10 more before we finally settled on the house we will be buying next Friday.

The negotiations on the house we will be buying went rather well. They countered with a price lower then they were asking and they agreed to all the stuff we added to the loan. Half of which I expected to drop to get a lower price. With all parties agreed on a potential sale price the next step was the home inspection. I was a bit of a nervous wreck waiting for this thing. What if the place turned out to be a dump? I'm not a home inspector but it looked nice to me. What if it isn't nice? Thankfully it was nice. A few minor tweaks and the house will be good to go. Nothing major need to be done to the house at all. The things that need to be done were all things I can knock out in a weekend of futzing around the house.

So with the house hunting and negotiations behind us it was just loan paperwork next. I have good credit and I pay off my credit cards and rarely carry a balance for more than a month. I don't spend a lot and try and keep things in check financially. That still doesn't stop your mind from going crazy when you are up for a home loan. After all this isn't like buying a car, this is over 100,000 dollars we are talking about. Even more for some people. Luckily for our Mortgage Broker I recently started to keep all my paperwork electronically as .pdf files. So when she needed paperwork all I had to do was email it over. What little I didn't have I scanned into the computer with ease.

I don't want to make this part of the process sound easy but it really was. I would get emails about what paperwork I had to get and I would get it then send it to my Mortgage Broker. What was nerve wracking was the actual money part of it. Trying to keep enough in my accounts for the down payment was a bit of a challenge. Not only do I need the down payment but I also need more just so the bank knows I'm not a broke loser. On top of all that money I also have to continue to pay bills and feed two people and a dog. That was the biggest pain in the ass of the whole process. My second piece of advice if you plan on buying a house. Save up about ten grand before you even start looking. It will make the whole loan application process a lot simpler.

So by this time next Friday I will be a home owner. I have had a lot of people asking to see the house so I was planning on posting some pictures when we took some but all we have right now is pictures from the listing. I'm just going to post them because I don't know how long it will be before I get around to taking some myself.