The House Hunt

We were excited to start our search for the perfect house back in October. We saw quite a few that we loved but our offers weren't accepted. We had to back out of one offer because we found out that the property had special assessment taxes (city beautification type deal) that would have knocked our mortgage payment way out of our comfort zone.

Jump to January, we are completely and totally done with the ups and downs of the house buying process. We decide to take a sceond look at the first house we liked during our hunt and put an offer on it. It was aceepted and we went into escrow! How happy we were! We went furniture shopping to get an idea of how we wanted to furnish the place. I gathered tons of paint samples so we can choose colors to paint each room. Things were going great! We were going to be homeowners as of February 27! Uh....no...not THAT easy!

Last Wednesday I called our lender to see if there's anything at all that would hinder the process. We were about to put in our 30 day notice for the apartment and pay $1500 to get out of the lease. Good thing I called because the lender was just going over the apraisal report she had received on the house. I was excited because I thought the process was going quicker than expected. My excitement was only momentart because she informed me that the house was appraised $17,000 less than what we agreed to pay. Our only options were to come up with reasons the house is the price it is and hope the appraiser agrees OR pay the difference. Um, yea...I doubt eaither is gonna happen. Needless to say my dreams were shot. I went into a depression for a day or two because of that and the fact that the seller's agent wasn't returning my agent's calls. We canceled the inspection that was scheduled that Saturday and went looking at more houses instead.

Our house hunt this Saturday was nowhere near as exciting as they used to be. We saw nice houses that are bigger and prettier than ours but we don't want them. Yea, who would pass up a nicer house? Apparently us! The other houses have that stupid assessment tax that would kill us in payments unless we bid super low. That would mean we would very likely not get the house so what's the point of getting our hopes up? As for our house, it has the taxes as well but they have been in place for 20 years now and will mature in 4 years so once that happens those taxes will be out of our lives. Plus, since they were put in place 20 years ago they are much lower than the ones imposed now.

So, as you can see the house buying process is stressful. It's no fun and it just flat out sucks! We heard back from the other agent yesterday and they plan to fight the appraisal value. My hope is that they and the appraiser come to an agreement so we can get our house.