The meeting went well. Brian and I are more confused then ever. I wrote an email to my mom so I will copy that here. I think I wrote it out the best I can. We are still waiting on one thing to fall in place but that should be soon so I dont know.
"We still don't know what to do about the house. We have less then we thought extra (meaning after we pay all our bills and mortgage we do have some money extra just not as much) but we do have some extra. We have also guessed high in some categories like groceries, his cell phone, car insurance, etc so we will have more extra then what is showing. We have estimated $100 a month for water/natural gas and $100 a month of electric. Our heat and stove will be from natural gas and electric for the appliances and AC. We figure those two things will flip. In the summer our gas/water bill will be lower but our electric higher, in the winter electric will be lower but gas/water will be higher. We are also getting a tankless water heater (I think 2 technically) with this house so that should save on electric as well. We won't be able to buy any new furniture which is okay. We don't really need anything new at the moment and I have all the furniture that you guys are bringing down for me. There are some bits and pieces that we would like sooner like a kitchen table for the bay window (our current table would go into the dining room) but we would have time to save up and there is always xmas presents :). Brian predicts if we do it, it might be a bit tough for the first 2 years but it would only get easier after that. We still need to definitively figure out how much exactly we are paying for student loans but that is on Brian and we need to wait on one more thing. We also may not be able to do as much work around the house as early as we would like but that is okay too...Brian and I know nothing about home decorating and we will want help figuring out what to do and what to pick. That will give you time to come down (or up from Charleston) and help pick things out. Also we should probably live in a house for awhile before we start making changes.
We are still debating what the smartest thing to do with the extra money we save between now and then, if we do this. Brian is leaning towards using it to get the appliances that we want. The washer/dryer would be the cheap ones as that is less important (and replace that possibly later) but getting the fridge and dishwasher we want and maybe get my kitchen table, etc. His thinking is: If we spend 700 on a fridge now and then X on the fridge we want later we will have wasted $700 and same thing for the dishwasher. I am leaning toward either paying off some of the student loans so we have that $50 a month extra or putting it with my 10k and making us get that much closer to an accurate emergency fund. The interest on the house is tax deductible where his student loans aren't. I don't know. Though we have time to figure that out if we decide to do this.
We would definitely would have to change our lifestyle but I don't think we would have to cut out so much that we would not have fun anymore. My fun road trips would not happen as frequently but aren't out of the picture thanks to xmas/bday. Our taxes we figure go towards tiling the floors, finishing the garage, etc. We could definitely be better with food but that will be easier when we actually get a schedule and can stick to it which will happen with the upcoming change. I also can let Brian play his game more rather then watching tv or both of us looking at each other because we want to do something but we cant. I say we cant because there really isnt much we would want to do even if we had all the money in the world and the few things that we could do/want to do cost a lot due to tourists and we are cheap. Buying a home and getting the home we want is worth some sacrifice and Brian and I are willing and wanting to sacrifice for it.
We also love the house and like the lot out of our choices and don't really want to lose it if we can actually do this. We just cant decide if we can do it or not. We can...so I guess the real question is should we do this. And no one is able to tell me that and it is driving me nuts. I am still shocked putting more down hurts us and Brian is shocked they approved us. In his eyes, he thought BofA would run numbers happily but then say a quick and easy "NO" when they looked at everything in terms of approving it. Now it does have to go through an actual underwriter but Bankerman isnt concerned about that. So when they said yes he started to think that maybe we could do it. The Bankerman we have been talking to seems to be really conservative in who he recommends to buy and who he tries to steer clear from it. He kept referring to us like we would make this work easy that we weren't in the situation he sees lots of people are in where $100 will make or break the sale. It was almost as if we were making 100k a year and were concerned about making a $500 dollar a month mortgage work. Though at the same time he wasn't pushy at all. Our conversation last night was him just explaining what everything meant so we could then see if we felt we could do it.
ARG! I don't know why people chose to do this more then once!"
Basically the bank that we are looking at approved us which has shocked Brian. I kind of thought they would. What has shocked me was that putting twice the down payment than what was originally quoted hurts us. The numbers were originally worked up with 7k as a down payment. If we put 14k we would lose a lot of the lenders payments and have to pay 6k more in closing costs. So we will have "extra money" on top of what we are paying for the closing costs and we are stuck on what the smartest thing to do with it as you can see.
I just wish someone would/could tell us whether we should do this or not. We technically can but sometimes just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. If everyone did what they should do and not just what they could do we wouldn't be in this economical mess.
We don't want to miss out on this opportunity if this is what we should do. And I don't think this is a situation where if you should do it the answer is an easy "yes" and if you are having difficulty deciding then the answer is "no". I think buying a house is a hard decision where one never really knows and one only hopes and that any responsible home buyer would have doubts and worries.
And I can't stop looking at the model home pictures....
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