Better Mom Reboot

Ok, so it has been over a year and I have been completely neglecting this blog.  As would be expected, a ton of stuff has happened this year. I started going back to school, and oh, yeah, we bought a house!

Last summer, a friend clued us in to a 0% down loan program for homes in rural areas, run by the USDA. There is a small community in our area that qualifies, so we thought we would go ahead and look at what was available. After looking at about 7 houses, we decided to go see where we stood in terms of actually getting a mortgage. We filled out some paperwork, and waited to hear how much we would need to lower our debt to income ratio in order to get a loan. To our shock and amazement, we discovered that we qualified for a loan much higher than we were planning right now! We wouldn’t even have to stick to the rural area, we could basically buy any home we wanted. When we left our lender’s office, I cried because I was so happy that our hard work was finally paying off!

 Armed with monthly payment calculations for a few different loan amounts, we found a price we could afford comfortably, and a price we were willing to go up to if we found something absolutely spectacular.  Over the course of the next 6 months we looked at lots of houses and gradually narrowed down our neighborhood options, as well as home features we wanted.

We suffered a few disappointments. We found a house we loved that was in the right neighborhood and had an acre lot, but it turned out the seller had already accepted an offer. It looked like the buyer was going to back out, so we were poised and ready to submit our offer, but the buyer followed through and we had to keep looking. We found another great house that had all of the features we wanted and a big back yard. As a bonus, it also had new carpet and paint. We put in an offer, but the listing agent sat on it instead of presenting it to the bank, and in the meantime, the bank decided to auction it instead. The house sold at auction for $20,000 less than we had offered. Frustrating.

Finally, we found a short sale that was well within our budget and had most of the features we wanted. It was in a great location, so we offered. The home owner accepted our offer within 24 hours, so then we just had to wait for bank approval. So we waited. Aaannnd we waited, and we waited some more. 7 months later, the bank approved it and we went into escrow. In less than 30 days, escrow closed and we were home owners. There were some issues with getting possession of the house, but after a few very stressful days and some extra labor to remove the previous occupant’s garbage (literally, he had cancelled his trash service and had been piling bags of trash in the garage for MONTHS. It was nasty) it all worked out OK, thank goodness.

Our new home.

Packing and moving was a huge task. I do not have any good tips on moving. We are terrible at it. Our move was totally disorganized and it took almost a week to complete. Now we are in our new home, and are trying to trudge through the unpacking process. It is going slowly (and I mean really slowly,) but surely.  In the process of moving, and getting the house functional, we also used up our savings and charged back up some of our debt. Now we have the challenge of unpacking, doing some minor home repair and renovations, and decorating our new place on a very tight budget so that we can get that debt paid down again. We are basically starting all over again, so I am trying to think of it as a fun creative challenge to come up with more ways to save. That’s fun, right? RIGHT??