We spent the day looking at houses. We left the kids with Rachel’s mom. After looking at all the houses I think we determined that we prefer newer houses over older ones. That sounds like a given, but the trade-off is that you get bigger yards, more mature trees and neighborhoods with older houses. The new homes were built on smaller lots so you don’t have much yard and houses are so close together. We did decide to put an offer on...

Rachel and I just gone done going through the budget together. I always enjoy doing it together because generally it is just me and then I give her a printout of where we are at and she says “OK”. It’s been helpful to get on the same page and set some goals as well be purchasing a new home and our mortgage payment could go up as much as $500/month. I didn’t know how we could do it, but we’ve found a number of ways...

As we have been looking for houses we started tracking them in an Excel spreadsheet. It became problematic though. Here are the reasons why: Rachel just couldn’t figure out URLs and hyperlinks Sometimes we looked at houses on the computer, sometimes on the laptop. Transferring the spreadsheet back and forth became problematic. Sometimes I looked on the computer and Rachel looked on the laptop. Keeping the spreadsheet in sync was again,...

We got an offer on our house this morning. The offer was $2000 less than our asking price and they wanted us to pay closing costs and they wanted all our appliances. We counter offered and raised the price and lowered what they wanted us to pay in closing. Essentially our counter offer gave us $10,000 more at closing. They accepted the counter offer and we are now officially under contract!

At around 2:30 today we got a call letting us know that someone wanted to come look at the house between 4:00 – 5:00. I was supposed to be on a support call with a client, so I just went in to work. Rachel packed up the kids and went to visit her grandparents. Later as we were just finishing dinner, we got a knock at the door. It was the agent that had come by earlier. The person who came through wanted to see it again, but with her...