Our Story, Part 3: the great house hunt of 2007

Welcome to a special Wednesday edition of Our Story.  We’ll get back to regular Friday updates next week, but we’ve got something great coming up for Black Friday this week.  Enjoy!

Fall 2007 was a pretty cool time in our relationship.  We had recently been engaged, and had decided to start thinking about buying a house that I could live in until we got married in April 2008.  The biggest thing we learned during the process?  Get a realtor, and a good one.  And that’s just what we did.

One of my colleagues (who happens to come from a real estate family) was able to refer us to Graham Duryee, the office manager for Greenridge Realty in Holland.  Now, we’re guessing that as the manager, and with the amount of real estate experience that he has, Graham probably had bigger house fish to fry, but he more than willingly took on our modest little home purchase, and we’re so glad he did.  The amount of knowledge the man has about what he does is really tremendous, and the guy is an excellent salesman as well.

The first house that we looked at was one that we found while driving around town, and it didn’t really end up working out.  Nice house, but it didn’t really meet our space desire: 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms.  Taking this into consideration, Graham came back with a list of 6 houses in our price range and with the bedrooms/bathrooms we were looking for.  He took us through all 6 on one Saturday in October, and it was pretty cool because my sister and her husband happened to be visiting at that time as well and they were able to come along with us.  We liked the houses, but the first one we saw really stood out.  After going through the hurdles of figuring out financing and so forth, we went for it!

A couple thoughts on the purchase and what we might have done differently, looking back now:

• We did not have a full 15% to put down to avoid PMI, so we borrowed a portion of our down payment from family.  The party we borrowed from was totally gracious about repayment, but we don’t necessarily think loans among family is the best option.  Obviously we don’t totally look down on it, either.  We just felt that, after we made that decision, that the loan was something we needed to knock out quick!  (See a future post on this subject.)
• Along the same lines, we might have waited to buy the house.  The real estate bug got to us!  We could have potentially rented for 1 or 2 years and then purchased after we had saved up.  If you’re right out of college, single, newly married, hold off for a while!  It will help you to figure out what you’ll need in a home.  Thankfully, our house seems to fit us like a glove!
• We ascribe to the Dave Ramsey philosophy that your house payment should be no more than 1/4 of your take home pay.  He does allow for some flexibility, but we still ended up pretty tight with that figure.  That being said, we probably couldn’t have gone much lower in house, either.  You just have to be really thoughtful about what could potentially happen in life and be prepared.

Just a few thoughts as we look back on one of the most fun parts of our engaged/married life so far.

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Look for the next edition of Our Story next Friday.