This home buying stuff is a good lesson in math, investments, planning, and borrowing money.

The whole time you are searching for a home, you have to keep in mind your price range. Your price range largely depends on how much you have saved to put down as your initial down payment. Your budget will also be affected depending on what rate the bank will offer you on your loan, and that depends on your credit, and how much you want to borrow.

Then you gotta factor in the real estate taxes, and if there are any other fees associated with a condominium or other common thing.

At the end of it, one has to decide whether all this is a wise investment. Sometimes, you really like a house, but it doesn’t meet your most basic needs and desires. Sometimes you like a house, but it’s price is just beyond your reasonable monthly expenditures, and buying it would be a poor investment.

So, here we are at another financial battle. The original offer for the home we liked was high, so we made an offer, taking about 7-8% off the asking price. Unfortunately, they came back with a counter offer that was $10,000 more than we offered them. Now, as our “final” offer, we went up $2000. At this point, it becomes a matter of wise investing…

If we go higher, the house might not appraise at that high value, in which case we wouldn’t be able to be approved for our loan. Not only that, but then we might feel like on resale, we might never make back what we invested.

Today, the seller will once again be given a chance to accept our offer. If they do, hurray, we move on.

If they don’t, I think we will walk again, and start looking again. Either way, we’ll keep moving forward.

Here’s a picture of the house we’re trying to get, from the front/side view…

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