It's Official!

Todd & I are officially in contract for our house and in fact, if all goes well with the inspection this morning, we'll be closing at the end of the month! This process definitely went by a lot faster than anticipated but we're so excited to have a place we can call our own. We looked at this house in January but wanted to do a little bit more research because it was a short sale home; however, once we decided we wanted to put an offer on it a few days later, there were already 4 other offers and it was off the market. As luck would have it, all the offers fell through so we were able to snag it up and the seller accepted our offer, but since it's a short sale, it also had to go through the seller's lender, which is where the hold up usually is in these situations. Our realtor warned us it could take awhile, possibly up to six months, to hear back. Imagine our surprise when 3 weeks later we get a phone call saying the lender accepted our offer & we're officially in contract for the house. This literally just happened at the beginning of the week. From that point on, we have 10 days to do a lot of stuff, including the inspection, and will close on March 26.

Hopefully our new home in about a month

Our lease for our townhome is up at the end of April so all of this truly worked out perfectly as we'll be able to fix up the house without actually having to move in yet. There will be quite a bit of work to do & things to buy, like new appliances, but it's a very exciting process and I can't wait for the day to pull in the garage and walk into our new home.

When we began looking at houses at the beginning of January, we started to seriously budget our money. Sure we kept track of what we spent every month but didn't really focus on setting a certain limit on things like how much we should spend every month for going out to eat or shopping. It's amazes how much money goes to waste when you aren't paying attention! We now have a set amount that Todd & I can spend together (going to dinner, the movies, etc) and a set amount we can spend individually on whatever we please (for me that would pretty much be the races I run & shopping at Target). We found that actually setting a limit forces us to think twice about impulse purchases (do I really need another $42 tank top from lululemon?) & has let us really focus on saving money for our house. Luckily, we've both never been the type to spend more than we have and have zero credit card debt. Although we might be closing on our house sooner than anticipated, we are trying to still save as much as can through this month so we can not only have a 20% down payment, pay our closing costs, and buy new appliances, but we should still have enough left in our savings account for an emergency fund. Looks like it was a good thing I gave up going to Target for Lent!