Well, it's happening for real. I drove around with my realtor yesterday and visited some houses.
The first house was the clear winner of the day. It was a well-kept home in a great location at a wonderful price. It also turns out to have been put into "Contingent sale" status. This means that someone has made an offer and unless some part of the process falls through, I'm not going to be able to buy it.
Houses 2-4 were all pretty terrible. Strange layouts, a mysterious "4th bedroom" in the garage that probably wasn't up to code, and just some not-so-good looking stuff. House #5 was the second place house, but it wasn't so good. I think I can do better, so I'm going to try to arrange time with the realtor to check out more places next week. After all, there are lots and lots of houses available, so there's no reason to settle for something I don't want.
Equifax threw a little curve ball at me, with a collections that wasn't mind that they said they had cleared but really didn't. So I sent them a follow-up letter and hopefully this gets resolved in the next couple weeks so that if I see something, I can move on it more quickly.
I've got myself set up with a $175000 hard cap with 10% down. This means I will have basically no problem getting a loan and (once the credit report gets cleared up) I should also qualify for a really good interest rate. It looks like the rates are in the low 5% range for 30-year fixed, which is probably about as low as I think it's going to go.
Spring break came and went. I got a lot of stuff done that I wanted to. I have most of my notes ready for the rest of the semester, and I started into chapter 3 of my textbook. In the next week, I have to prepare a midterm for my Math 093 class, but that one is easy to do. This frees me up for all sorts of textbook writing time.
I played some basketball for the first time in a long time this week. At church, they've started a weekly pick-up basketball league, but it's on a night that I teach. It was good to run around a bit, and I'm still feeling a little sore and stiff from it (evidence that I'm quite a bit out of shape).
I was planning to talk to the front office of the apartment complex today to find out about how they would deal with my lease if I buy a house. I know they want 60 days notice (yes... 60 days), but besides that, I want to make sure they don't have any other little policies or anything I need to be aware of. I'll try to remember to take care of that later.
I've decided to go with the Beginner level backgammon tournament again. Jason convinced me that I need to gain more live play experience. I have continued to play against Jason and the computer, but I haven't put as much effort into the analysis as I should be doing if I really intend to get better. I need to make a conscious effort to focus on my mistakes if I ever want to correct them.
