Home Search
For the past 3 weeks, Melissa and I have been on the hunt for a home. We’ve been throwing enough money into our apartment complex, and since they decided to be punks and tell us that we can’t get credited for the “Internet Credit” that they had been letting us do for a year and a half, we’ve decided it’s finally time that we move towards ownership rather than renting. Not to mention, painting and home improvement projects are fun!
But, Melissa and I didn’t realize how difficult this home search thing was going to be! We’ve spent countless numbers of hours sifting online at the various different homes that are up for sale, including having our realtor take us by at least 8 or 10 of them - only to find that most of them are not as impressive as we had hoped they would be.
We ended up sending an offer to one home. They had started asking $129K for it, then they went down to $124,900. The home is old and in “okay” condition. From what we can tell, though, there are foundation issues with it. The owners seem to think it’s just “settling” - but diagonal cracks from a window tell me otherwise. We went ahead and shot an offer of $120,000 and having them pick up $5,000 in closing costs (because we won’t be able to close on a home if we don’t have the seller pay for the closing costs). They flat out refused the offer and wouldn’t even consider counter offering.
So now Melissa and I are considering these new homes that have been built by Main Street homes on the south side of College Station (Wellborn, actually). They do all the financing themselves, so closing costs and “down payments” will be rolled into the cost of the mortgage, so we don’t pay a dime at the time of closing and moving into the home. The home we want is about $125,000, but with $11,000 in closing costs the final mortgage price will come out to being close to $136,000 - making our monthly payments roughly $1,360. This is doable for us if Melissa goes to work full-time, or if I get the job I’m hoping (but not betting on) getting with Customer Applications @ CIS.
In any case, it’s about lunch time, but I felt like rambling about how difficult it is to do the home search thing.
