To continue our story on buying our first house…April and I talked it over a good bit and slept on it, and the next evening submitted an offer to purchase the house. As I said before, the asking price on the house was $213,000. Our initial offer to buy was at $190,000 with the seller paying up to $5,000 in closing costs. We also threw in that we would like the refrigerator. Well, after a few counter-offers and counter-counter-offers, we reached an agreement about a week after we had visited the house!

The final agreement was $204,000 with the sellers paying $4,500 in closing costs. Now this $204,000 was definitely our stretching point. We had really been hoping to get it at $200,000 or under, but at the same time we knew this was a long way for them to drop it, considering they were already listing it for 2,000 under what they paid for it in 2008. Throughout the process I studiously crammed my brain with knowledge from Home Buying for Dummies book as well as tons of resources on the internet to make sure I knew what we were doing. I also tweaked our written monthly budget to account for owning a house and other expenses that came along with this decision.

We are definitely going to have to be pretty strict about where all of our money goes and try to stick as close to the budget plan as possible, but I have made sure to “spend” portions of our income into church tithe, building up our emergency fund (which is building up pretty decently), and putting money into savings for retirement via our 401k’s and my Sharebuilder IRA.

So, we had the home inspected and overall everything looked to be in great condition for its 16 years. There was a leak under the master shower that seems to maybe only happen if the shower head is angle just a certain way against the wall. The relocation company, Cartus, that we are dealing with has approved pretty much all of the repairs we asked for, even the small things….so that turned out really well for us. The only thing we are sorta bummed about is that the roof & heating/cooling are original (16 years old), so while the sellers are paying for the first year of home warranty, I’m thinking I’ll perhaps want to just budget to keep that renewed and think of it as insurance for issues that might arise.

So at this point we have done tons of signing and initialing all over the place for contract agreements, seller disclosures, request for repair, etc. Now we are just waiting around…the appraisal for mortgage should be done soon, our closing meeting will be at 4pm on February 25th. We really need to start packing up! We have lots of boxes stacked up but nothing has been put in them yet.

Keep you posted of any updates!

Related articles

• Buying our First House! – Part I (thisorrthat.com)
• Buying our First House! – Part II (thisorrthat.com)