New Adventure

Oh, milestones.

Sweet 16. Getting your first car. Prom. Graduating high school. Getting into college. Turning 21.

Graduating college. Getting married. Getting your first "grown up" job. Having babies. Doing grown up things, like buying a car that isn't 10 years old. Taking vacations without your parents. Etc, etc.

Also....buying a house. Eek!

I have a lot of friends that have bought houses. Coworkers buying houses. Seems so grown up! Paying a (duh duh duhhhhh) mortgage....it is something that we have resisted since we've been married....at first because we just wanted to get settled into married life......then there was so much uncertainty in our marriage last year.......but this year.......well, nothing major happened to change our minds, except for a teeny little flyer we got in the mail last week.

Turns out, our apartments are owned by (partnered with?) Dominion Homes. Also turns out, 20% of the rent we've been paying here since October of 2009 can go towards the purchase of a new house (wow). That is a big perk. Also a big perk is that we have very little saved towards a down payment (seeing as how we just started thinking about this, oh, 2 weeks ago) - they have programs that would basically get us out of a down payment (a program called Helping Hands).

The perks are huge - Dominion only deals with new builds and new property. They don't sell "used" homes. This is good for us because say the roof gets damaged or the water heater blows or the air conditioner goes out - all of it is brand new, so it's all warrantable, which means no money out of pocket for us. The money we've earned through our apartments would more than cover our closing costs, and the Helping Hands program is really nice. Basically, it means that they build our house. But instead of hiring a painting crew to come in and paint the inside of the house, they supply all the paint and brushes, and we do it ourselves. Instead of hiring a landscape company to install mulch and shrubs, we do it (pretty sure I could bribe a guy or 2 to come do that for me). Neat, huh?

Downfalls - really the biggest and only one I can think of is resale opportunity. We basically would pick a model and they would build it. But, there would be a lot of houses just like ours around the city. And buying a house together - what a huge step. HUGE. And a little scary.

Sounds like everything is a "go" for the financial side of it, so we're taking a big step this weekend and going and looking at a couple houses. With a realtor. TO BUY A HOUSE.

Hard to wrap my mind around. Holy crap.

Wish us luck!