Selling and Buying our First Home Together!

We are well onto a major milestone and adventure in married life....buying our first home together! Our dreams of buying a new home have pretty much been just that since last summer, until we received some wonderful news last weekend. Up to this point my home buying knowledge and experience had been limited to touring open houses, so I thought I would share our process and share my learning about everything that goes into buying and selling a home as we go. Its even a whole new vocabulary, and I'm trying to keep up with all the house lingo!

As usual on Friday I was browsing houses and dreaming, and saw a gorgeous house in our price range and called the listing agent to see about touring the home. She offered to do a market analysis on our house first, and when she came to see the house on Saturday we were happy to hear that our upgrades (tile, granite, soon to be new carpet) had paid off. Our listing agent is wonderful, and I felt really good about her marketing strategy and plans for selling our home. But before we could list, we needed to make sure we could even qualify on a new home.

I called the mortgage broker right away, and he agreed to meet us the next day. I like to think we are fairly organized, and we were quickly able to gather all the necessary documents to pre-qualify.

• Bank statements for the past month and listings of all assets and accounts 
• IRA's/401k/CD statements for the past month
• Taxes and W2's from the past two years
• VA paperwork 
• Current mortgage information 

At least for us, pre-qualifying was a fairly easy step. Thankfully with not having anything negative on our credit, paying things off, all of Joel's time with the FAA, and me now having 2 years at the VA, we were happily surprised at our options. We need to have one more meeting with a title officer to go over some other paperwork before we could start our home search. The mortgage lender warned us though, it's hard to see a house and then you get emotional about it when you have to sell yours, so he suggested we don't even look at other houses until ours sells. But where would we live?! It's just too tempting not to start looking, especially since now we are serious buyers. We are considering making a contingency offer if we find something we really love, basically an offer contingent on our house selling.

So the next few weeks will be spent putting together some last minute details, painting, de-cluttering and organizing. Tonight we are supposed to be moving bricks out of our backyard and tidying it up, but when I learned that the price was dropped on one of our houses and it's getting pulled off the market next week, I texted Joel immediately so that we could go tonight and take a second look. We only have a week to decide, so maybe it's a good thing we've already been house hunting for the last year!

I guess our bricks will just have to wait for now!