This is a the first of a series of posts about buying a home for the first time. It will be following our journey through this process, and hopefully some of the things we learn will be beneficial to others. A note here, these are being written after the fact. I figured that writing about how we never bought a house would be less than beneficial, not to mention bit disappointing for me as a writer. So I waited until we were finished to start writing about it.
My wife and I recently realized that the stars were starting to align for us to potentially buy a house. Something that never before seemed a possibility for my wife and I.
Here is a brief summary of what had happened to get us to consider looking at buying a house.
- I got offered and would soon be starting a permanent position where I had been working as a contractor.
- Our apartment lease, which we loved, was ending in 2 months.
- We had been able to save quite a bit of money for a variety of things and realized it could be put towards a house.
- We realized that we would be living here in Las Vegas for at least several years.
- The government was offering a great tax credit to first time home buyers ($8,000).
All of these things together meant that we might be able to afford a house and could consider starting the process of looking for and trying to buy one. We have dreamed about it before. Tried to save some money, and even thought about permanently living in one place. However until we realized that we had all of these things going for us we had not considered it seriously at all.
These are big steps to consider with the mindset we had had for so long. We basically had been students for 6 years and gotten quite used to being poor, and moving around a lot. Now we are on the verge of being grown ups, with a job to go to each day.
Even with the new full time job on the horizon, being a parent to three and a husband I didn’t feel responsible or the need to actually try and be stable. I am sure that a bit of nesting behavior may start to set in now that we are committed to staying here for a while.
So we decided to try and buy a house. The first step is figuring out what the first step was. This sounds kind of funny, but actually it is true. I am an accomplished scientist, and my wife is a trained educator, but the real estate market is a totally new ball game.
We new that we would need a down payment, a loan, a real estate agent (I know you could get around this, but I made the assumption that it is probably more advanced than a total newbie could handle), and of course time and effort to find a house and then try and close the deal (randomly found out that only 1 in 50 in Las Vegas, NV close the deal on their first pick, Wow).
I was under the impression that this would take a really long time to do. Talking to some friends and family I found out that it could go much faster, like 3 weeks or less. That would require a few things to be in clear order, especially finances, but it can go fast.
So in summary of this first post about buying a home, the first step is considering if you might be able to afford buying a house. Then think do you want to even buy one at all? There are a lot of reasons why perhaps you wouldn’t want to and those are important to consider. If all of these things make sense, you do actually want to buy a house where you are, and might be able to afford one, then you can move forward and see what happens.
I personally believe that set backs and failures aren’t a bad thing to experience. These are great opportunities to learn from and to use too more accurately shape your future plans and goals. Then again if you know you can’t afford one or just don’t want to live permanently where you are currently there is no need to go through any unnecessary setbacks and failures.
For us we realized that we wanted to buy a house. We felt ready for this step and willing to deal with the trouble that would come from being a home owner. We also had a great situation to fall back on if we ended up not buying a home at all. Our apartment was renewable and we would lose anything by looking to see if there was a home that we liked.
For you what was the first thing that moved you towards the home buying process?
Next up, figuring out the finances.
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