On moving, home buying, and me

Well, it’s been much longer than I had planned between writing here. But I have a reason excuse?

I just purchased my first home. It’s pretty exhausting and umm just really a general pain in the ass. However it is also pretty damn exciting. I’m relatively late to the game at 38 for a first home. I’ve been making enough money to get the job done for quite some time now but due to a marriage, child, divorce. I ended up doing some moving around and really grew to enjoy the freedom of being able to be where ever I really needed to be, if I really needed to be there.

My general first time home buying view is not as great as it could have been. But it certainly was an interesting learning experience. The home that I purchased was the second home I brought into the underwriting stage. Which, for the uninitiated I’ll just say is pretty far into the “buy it” portion of the game. All the inspections, appraisals, repair work, documenting repair work, re-repair work due to lack of work permit originally had already been completed it was simply the act of jumping through the lender’s financial hoops for final thumbs up.

The annoying part is that the financial guy should have caught the problem the second he had all the financial numbers. In a nutshell, since the whole housing market collapse debacle, the mortgage industry does a lot more due diligence (as then damn well should have been doing all along!) which basically results in many small rules changing every week. Well, absolutely your financial guy should be on top of every nuance of it. That’s his job. However in this case, since I earned my income though contracting, I had to prove a years worth of uninterrupted employment instead of a standard six months, for you average permanent employee.

Make no mistake, I am happy to abide by any laws / rules that guide this process, but this was something that could have saved a whole lot of people a whole lot of time. In the end, the sellers did not want to risk not selling their house on the hopes of my employment not being terminated (which was never an issue, but how do you really prove that anyway.) I can’t blame them, though sadly, their house is still for sale and I live in a larger house around the corner for the same price. Sometimes gambles don’t pay off, or maybe they just didn’t care.

It was tough getting that far invested into a house and then have it unravel. It all worked out for the best and my financial guy did in fact come through come close time, which I really appreciated and totally helped out at the exact second I needed it to!

The second house, the one in I did in fact buy, really felt like home the second I walked into it, and the seller was great and easy to work with. I like to think I was a good buyer as well. After negotiating the price that is

It’s just almost a surreal feeling to sit in my basement in front of my computer and bang out a post in my own home. I honestly thought I would never buy one. It’s amazing how much life changes, and how good it can turn out being despite hard-times, penny-pinching, and life’s not-so-little obstacles.

Overall, the whole experience is a must have. +1