So, unexpectedly, I found it. The house.
Put in an offer. Liked their counter. Ratified the contract yesterday.
Inspection this week. If all goes as planned, closing before the end of February. Yikes!
The interior of the house is amazing. Completely re-done. All new appliances. Very energy efficient. The front landscaping is nice, but the backyard needs work. New fence, some sort of storage shed, etc. Going to be pricey, but not as expensive as it could be. Now I’m debating how much money to put down. I want to keep a decent amount of cash on hand for the extra work I want to do. But I also want to keep my mortgage costs low. I’ve been using an online calculator to figure out just how much my payments will be. Next step is to start looking at the mortgage rates being offered me. Cross your fingers that everything goes well!
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
Seriously exciting! The single best “calculator” option to help evaluate your options is the Mortgage Payment Calculator by Vertex42.com It’s available for Excel or Google Docs. If you search for it, it should be one of the first results. The best part is the multiple columns and extra section for additional principal payments. Since you’re a PF junkie, I thought you might love it as much as I did.
Congrats!!!! Hope the inspection goes well ! Hope everything goes well really! Really happy for you 🙂
Congrats! Can’t wait to see/hear all the details 🙂