All of a sudden I’d lost my way out of this city
So Andy and I are planning on buying a house in the next few months, hoping to take advantage of that nice $8000 tax credit. All we’ve done so far is look around at various open houses around town and browse the internet…and think about our finances.
We’re planning to meet with someone to talk about mortgages and all that fantastically scary stuff soon. I’m so utterly clueless. And of course, we want to put as much money down on a house as possible, but to me this is the frightening part. We can’t deplete our disposable savings because we’ll still need a lot for other expenses–washer/dryer, possibly fridge if we buy a new house, and god knows what else (like I said, clueless).
I have excellent credit, and Andy at least has very good credit, though he hasn’t checked his score in a while. Combine that with our incomes and we could afford more than we need as far as monthly payments go—the limiting factor in the whole thing being the down payment. We have a decent amount we could put down, but I don’t know if we could come up with 20% of the house cost. Parents may be able to help and maybe there’s other options available I don’t know about, but the whole thing makes me antsy and I want to just get it figured out already.
I’m also ready to look at more than just open houses–i.e., I’m ready for a realtor to show us some stuff. Since we’ve only been browsing around by ourselves, we’ve only looked at new homes. Which is entirely too much fun. I like new stuff. I have a feeling it might be hard to convince Andy or I to get a used home at this point. Then again, we’re pretty clueless right now still.
I’ve spent entirely too much time browsing listings online, and I seriously question the decorative choices of the people who live around me. Fuchsia paint? Insane wall paper? Taking pictures of your amazingly ugly furniture instead of the house…UGH. I even saw one house where the pictures showed trash and empty hangers all over the place. Too distracting for looking at pictures. So to even consider these houses, I’d need to see them in person.
Also, the idea of painting and dealing with wallpaper (unacceptable that I would live with any wallpaper!) does not thrill me. But then again as my dad pointed out, you can often get a better price on the home by willing to look past other people’s hideous choices and paint yourself.
If we do end up going with a new home, we could have it built. Maybe. I’m not sure how the timing would work out with that and the tax credit. I think Andy is more for this than I am at this point. But we’ll see.
I will say this about the experience so far: I am the more practical/cautious one of our relationship. 
