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.
Anyone else nervous??
So DH and I live in a 2 bedroom basement apt right now (DH owns the house with 2 very good friends). We have lived her for 2 1/2 years. We have no AC, the tiniest windows and have had every type of insect come down here at one time or another. Needless to say, we are ready to move. I spoke to Dh about getting an apt somewhere else instead of buying a house but he hates the fact that our money would just be burning up with rent payments instead of it going towards a mortgage like it is now. I agreed and we started looking at houses about 1 - 2 months ago. I was also just accepted into a nursing program at school and won't be working many hours come September, however Dh does do well at work but not sure if it's well enough for us to afford a mortgage. We have been pre-approved so I gues the bank thinks we can but I am still a little nervous. Has anyone else felt the same way or been in a similar situation and everything worked out fine? This will be our first home together so I guess I am just nervous??
Re: Anyone else nervous??
It's nerve-wracking to buy a house; I posted something similar when we were getting ready to put an offer in back in June. We just closed Monday.
What helped make us feel calmer was running the numbers. Have you started looking at houses yet? Once we got pre-approved, we got a realtor and actually looked at some houses in our price point to see if anything was even out there that we wanted. No harm, no foul.
If you end up finding a house you love in your price range, have your mortgage lender tell you what your monthly payments will be including everything (PMI, taxes, etc). Of course some will be good estimates (like home insurance if you roll that into your mortgage), but it did give us a really good idea what we'd be looking at. We then took our monthly income to see if that would work for us.
What about a down payment? Figure out how much you want to/can put down and see what that would leave in the bank. You should have a 6 month emergency fund, plus enough money to furnish the house, which includes random things you may not think of plus repairs.
We're just getting in the house this week and so far have spent $300 on interior paint + painting supplies, and probably $500 on other incidentals like new switch plate covers, a lawn mower, eventually getting a grill, window treatments for all the rooms, new smoke detectors, hose and sprinkler, etc. It's a lot! Plus you never know when something will break.
So it's normal to be nervous, but the numbers still have to work, so I would start looking at some houses, run the numbers, then see where you stand.