Buying A Home
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
How long before you were ready to buy did you get your pre-approval?
We are probably about 6 months off from being comfortable buying (no credit card debt, 5% down, closing costs and e-fund). Did you get your pre-approval after you were 100% ready, or did you get it a little earlier and start "window shopping"?
We already know what we are willing to spend and realize that we will probably get approved for much more than that, but I guess I am just anxious to have that approval in hand 
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Re: How long before you were ready to buy did you get your pre-approval?
I could be wrong, but I thought the pre-approval was only good for 60-90 days?
We waited until we were in a position to start making offers, although we already had a good idea of what we'd be approved for based on informal conversations with the broker.
Well, that shows how much of a newbie I am at this, because I had no idea, although it makes perfect sense. Thanks
You can get "pre-qualified" which gives you a rough estimate of what you'd be approved for, although it's by no means exact. It will give you a general idea, although you would still have to get pre-approved when you are ready to make an offer.
Keep in mind, they will probably approve you for a lot more than you can reasonably afford. We were approved for almost 5 times our annual salary, which is insane, imo.
After we determined how much we could afford we went around casually without a realtor to just check out houses in that price range, to see if we even wanted houses in that price range. (Also make sure you account for property taxes - they are outrageously high here and had a huge impact on what we could afford!) I'd say we looked at 5-6 houses on our own.
Once we saw a few that we thought were good, we got pre-approved and found a realtor. Pre-approval process was VERY easy. Took about 24 hours to get a letter back.
Cortlandt Place - My house blog
Thanks! I am lucky that I actually work in the title insurance industry (on the title side, so I am still somewhat clueless on the escrow side) but I can check out the property taxes for any house ahead of time. So I did factor those into what our monthly payment will be. Taxes are pretty dang high here too, and we will probably be paying around $600 a month for them.