Dude, sweet!

Good luck, Amy! Will this be the first home you've bought?

Just a heads-up - every real estate transaction we've been involved with has been a little bumpy - seems to be par for the course. The good news is that every one of them worked out OK, but they were all rollercoaster rides! I tell people to remember that all the parties involved want your money, so they usually find a way to make it happen!!

Dude, this is such an awesome time to be a buyer! I'd love it if we could move to something new--of course unloading what we currently live in would be the challenge. I am UBER jealous of folks buying for the first time!

I know...some of the new houses near me have me drooling...but I could never sell this house for anything close to what we paid for it. sigh

Once Erin is out of law school and working, we might look to get a second place while things are cheap and rent out our current place until the market turns around. Then again, we might not.

I would advise caution up here, Blaine. The market might take quite awhile to turn around, like it did in the early 90s.

It took us over a year to find a house because we were so cautious, so don't lose any sleep on my account. We qualified for twice as much house as we bought, and right now are on pace to pay off the mortgage in 7-8 years despite being on a single income for the past year and a half. Our main motivation for "upgrading" would be to avoid doing renovations on our existing house once we start having children, since I don't know how well we could recoup those costs. And that's why we'd rent out the house rather than sell it to finance another house - with the timing of when we bought I doubt that we'd be able to make much off the sale if anything. If we did buy a second house once she starts working, it would have to be at a level that we could afford to pay both mortgages should we not find tenants to fill our current house, and we probably wouldn't do anything unless we thought we were reasonably sure that we could cover the monthly mortgage w/rent payments and at least break even (w/a maintenance budget) anyway. When we bought our house, the only debt that Erin and I had was about $18k in student loan debt that I hadn't paid off yet that I have at a ridiculously low interest rate (~2%) - granted, when she graduates, we'll have another $60k in student loan debt, but we don't carry balances on our credit cards and we pay cash for our vehicles. Half of our extra money every month goes to savings and the rest goes towards the mortgage.