Booya!

Our offer was accepted!
We got a house!!!

We were totally low-balling them too. And they just went ahead and took it.

This is the most fantastic news EVER.

Totally not stressed at all.

Our awesome realtors have been brushing us off, communicating horribly, and over all just being very difficult.

I'm at my breaking point.

I've wanted to drop them and get a new realtor, but I promised Chris I'd give them one more shot. So, tonight is the night. It's 1:00 PM and we have yet to hear a word from our realtor that said he'd be taking us out this evening to see a few house. No email, no call, nothing. Chris is going to call him at 3:00 to see what's up.

If we're failed tonight, I'm calling a new realtor tomorrow. I got a good recomendation from a friend. We just can't afford to waste any more time waiting for these people to get their shit together.

I also have 2 assignments due tomorrow.

Oh, no, I'm not stressed out at all.

Keep it together.

Well, scratch that last blog. We're back to square one and it's beginning to stress me out.

The house pictured below turned out to be already taken. Someone else had put an offer in and because it was bank owned (they're so bad at communicating) it stayed on the market when it should have been taken off. I'm still seeing it pop up in my searches which just breaks my heart. I loved that house.

So our next step was to make a new list of houses we wanted to see, give them to our realtor, and go check them out. We sent over 5. A few hours later Mr. Cato informed us that 2 already have contracts on them, 1 was taken off the market for major repairs, 1 was rented out, and the last one can only be shown on Saturdays.

Ugh!

I freaked out a little, but I'm back in the game now. I made a new list. This time 10 houses. With our luck half of them would be gone already, but at least that still leaves 5.

We're going out in the morning to see 3 or 4 of them. The realtor says if we find one we love, we'll move on it fast. Put an offer in and keep our fingers crossed.

Hopefully we'll have some luck tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to keep it together.

Don Draper's kind of an ass.

Chris and I went out with our Realtor today. We were supposed to see 8 houses, but were unable to see a few of them and after seeing one in particular, we went ahead and ruled another out without even going to see it in person.

The one house that we LOVE is perfect. Not too big, not too small. Built in 1994. 3 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, 2 car garage.

Basically all it needs is some paint on the inside and a good carpet cleaning.

There's one more that we are going to look at hopefully on Monday or Tuesday, but after that we're pretty much settled.

Home ownership is in our very near future!

Approved!

I imagine that Subject Title to be spoken as the Target Lady from SNL as she slides someones credit card through the machine. "Approved!"

Anyway, we're officially pre-qualified for our home loan says our finance guy Mr. Moody. I really could just call him Eric, but when you have a last name like Moody you should use it at all times.

Our Realtor, Mr. Cato, is actually one of Chris's friends Dads. I'm not quite sure how to use apostrophes in those three words all together like that. (Chris's friend's Dad's) (Chris' friends Dad's) Oh, I don't know.

We're going out with Mr. Cato, or Mike...whatever you want to call him, on Saturday. We have a list of 11 houses in Lawrenceville that we want to look at. I doubt we'll get to them all in one day, but we might try to. They're all in the same area so getting from one place to another won't be a problem.

We are all ready, set, go on this so basically when we find the house we want, we're ready to make an offer. Exciting!

You can work from home.

School started this week. So far...pretty average. I'm taking 2 online classes. Composition & Rhetoric and Medical Terminology. I feel like I've written that in here recently, but I'm too lazy to go back and look.

I finished with my first 3 ENG assignments in one evening. The first 2 Medical Terminology assignments are a LOT more in depth. I'll be making a trip to Target tonight to pick up some dang flash cards. Yeah, I said it. Flash cards.

A study was done and it turns out that using red ink on yellow paper helps to put the information your looking at in your long term memory. Interesting.

Also, how can a teacher for an online class tell you that books and notes are not allowed on tests? Are they looking through the computer at me while I'm testing?

No, I get it...if you learn the information then you won't need the notes. Also, you need to know the stuff for the final anyway. All very true. But using your notes and book for a quick reference if you don't quite remember a thing or two on your tests isn't gonna hurt you. Just sayin...

Maybe the teacher should say "It's strongly recommended that you use your books and notes as little as possible on the tests, considering they're timed and you need to know the dang stuff anyway."

I listened to Rilo Kiley all day at work today.

"Judging from picture books apparently heaven is a partly cloudy place
And if the sky opened up and they let you in and gave you a formal invitation
Would you go?
You can work for home"

Home Ownership

I, like most people, have always hated dealing with tax stuff. Such a pain. That was, until I read about a little something I like to call the Federal Housing Tax Credit. This is the most amazing thing in the world to me at this moment.

Chris and I have been racking our brains trying to figure out a way to come up with around $3000 for a down payment on a house. We found a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house that we love for about $95,000 which would make our mortgage payment less than or the same as if we were to rent a 2 bedroom duplex. Of course at $95,000 you can assume it needs some updating and fixing up. That's the sort of thing we can do down the line when we have the extra money though. As long as it's livable and there's no damage that will costs us out the butthole to repair, then we're pretty set on this house....at least what we've seen of it.

Anyway, my point is this... This tax credit for new home buyers expires on July 1st. That means we have to close before that date to get the $7500.

The $7500 is basically a 0% interest loan from the government. You pay it back $500 a year over the next 15 years and I'm pretty sure they take it from your taxes. So if you'd normally get back $200 from your federal tax returns, you'll owe them $300 instead.

This is such a good freaking deal. You can even work it out to get the $7500 before you buy the house so you can use it for your down payment, but that's complicated and weird so I'm not sure we'd do that.

So I've worked it all out in my head. Plans are being made. I won't go into anymore detail about it because I'm sure it's pretty boring for anyone that's not interested in buying a house anytime soon.

I'm just saying....I'm getting really excited!