>I have some serious catching up to do in the way of the Project 31 challenge and life in general. For now, though, I thought I'd share our experience with making an offer on a house. That's right folks: we found a house we nearly love and made an offer on it yesterday!
Before making an offer, you MUST have your finances in order and when I say this I don't just mean you know what you make and your DH makes and what you spend. That is wayyyyy to general. You must literally disect every single little expense and factor in emergencies (like if you have pets) and anything upcoming (medical procedures, etc). B spent and entire DAY doing this. After it was done, we knew exactly what we could afford in the way of a mortgage. The next step was letting our lender know what that was.
We found this house on the first day we went out house hunting nearly 2 weeks ago. B was instantly in love and I was almost there. I was not in love with the location-yet. And this is SO SO SOOOOO important. No matter how nice and perfect the house is, you MUST like the location. You have to understand that when you're buying a house, you're also buying the location. If you have messy neighbors, a busy street, and a really long drive to work is it really worth it? Our house is on the corner and the street in front is not busy, but it certainly has moderate traffic. We stood around on the property for a good 20 minutes, watching the neighbors and cars go by. It is a very quite neighborhood and the traffic was not noisy or a safety concern.
After we had seen close to 15 properties we kept coming back to this house. We'd compare it to the others and in no way was this house comparable. It is that great. So on our last day out last week, we felt like we had seen it all, the best of the best in our price range and it was time to make a decision. Over the weekend we checked on the overall growth of the town, schools, churches, medical centers, and yes, nearby sex offenders. This down is on the rise in nearly every category (minus the sex offenders--there are eight in the entire town). We were ready to make a jump and try not to lose the house. We sat around thinking about it for so long we truly hoped it was still available. Lucky for us, it is a foreclosure and a previous offer on it last week did not go anywhere. It was go time!
We contacted our lender and had him send us a prequal letter and set up a time to meet with our realtor. We wanted to have our offer in first thing in the morning. Monday morning, we were up early. Nerves and happy anxiety coursed through our veins. We had breakfast at IHOP and headed to the office. Our realtor was still having trouble getting a hold of the listing agent on the house over the weekend so we tried again and he got through! He determined that the house was still available and it was time to make an offer. We called our lender and determined, based on what our offer would be, what our monthly payment would be just for good measure and got the ball rolling.
We spent the next hour and a half reading tons of paper work and initialing it at the bottom. Now, how do you make a good offer? The house was listed at nearly $5000 over what we were qualified for so we knew we would be going in at the top end of our qualification. We then put down $2000 in earnest money. Earnest money is just a way of saying, "Hey, we are super serious about this" and asked for $2500 in closing costs. Most realtors tell you that at least $1000 is necessary for earnest money but we wanted the bank to see our aggression. We also asking for part of the closing costs because banks rarely ever replace something if there is a flaw in the inspection. The buyer is always responsible for those things and well, it's the least they could do. ;) We asked to hear from the bank by Wednesday with an acceptance or counter offer and we were off. Logan had fallen asleep in his stroller and we were beaming ear to ear. Had we really just done that?!?!
Not four hours later the phone rang....
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
1 comment:
Leave some Lovin!