Whew. This month has been a whirlwind. It honestly doesn't even seem real yet that a dream I've had since I was 3 is becoming reality. This past week we signed a contract for our new home. It's a brand new build in a master planned community that we've had our eye on for several years. Our move-in date is set for late May. I don't think that it will really feel real until I have the key in my hand though.

This was a long, emotional process. Here's what our timeline has looked like so far:

  • Spring 2016 - We seriously looked into buying a home, but realized that the we didn't feel financially comfortable buying in the price range that we were most drawn to despite being pre-approved for it. We also didn't believe that we wanted to stay in the city we were in for very long.
  • Summer 2018 - We moved to a new city that we pretty instantly felt comfortable in and was the first place we felt we could happily stay in long-term
  • Fall 2018 - We started becoming frustrated with our rental situation. There were elements in our rental home that would be super easy to fix if we owned the place, but we didn't. We started doubling down on building up our down payment.
  • Jan 2019 - We created a list of needs vs wants. We tiered the wants into 1st-3rd priorities and tied them to a budget level. For example, if a house was on the higher end of our budget range, we would expect it to include more tiers of our want features.
  • Feb 22, 2019 - Met with a loan officer to discuss our options, and get cost estimate sheets detailing our closing costs and monthly payments for our home budget.
  • Feb 23-25, 2019 - Met with several realtors we had received referrals for, and ultimately picked and hired one.
  • Feb 28, 2019 - Applied for mortgage pre-approval from our ideal provider. We applied for several others during the rest of the process, but still ended up picking the original one we wanted.
  • Mar 02, 2019 - Toured 20+ homes in one day. We're pretty fast about walking through a home and knowing pretty quickly if it works for us. We fell in love with only one house about halfway through. We contacted them to place an offer almost immediately, but they were already under contract. This crushed us pretty hard and put a damper on the rest of the tours that day.
  • Mar 04, 2019 - We toured some of the builders within a master planned community that we had our eye on for a couple of years. We knew that we wanted to get into a home pretty quickly, and didn't have time to build so we only looked at spec homes that were available in our time frame.
  • Mar 05-09, 2019 - Went back and forth about our options, and made our decision. Received the contract.
  • Mar 10-12, 2019 - Read through and got clarifications around the contract. We waited til all of our questions were answered completely before scheduling a signing.
  • Mar 13, 2019 - Officially signed the contract!

So once we actually officially started the process, it took less than a month. I wouldn't recommend that. It was a highly stressful 3 weeks. I honestly thought that once we got past the boring stuff (saving, talking to loan officers and realtors, etc) that it would be fun and exciting. It really wasn't though. The weight of what a big decision this was really came down on us. Also, even though we've researched and planned as much as we could, this was still our first time going through this process. That inherently comes with a feeling of, "Am I doing this right?". Feelings of doubt are never great when you're in charge of making a decision that has such a big effect on your life.

We did do a couple of things that made the whole process a lot easier:

  1. My husband and I started touring homes extremely early. We've been going to open houses and touring builders since 2014. It wasn't something we did every week, but once a quarter or so we would do a couple of tours. This helped us figure out our styles, what features were just trends, and how different floorplans would work with our life. We were super lucky that our styles are so similar. Also, knowing exactly what we liked and disliked helped us pare down our options fast.
  2. We made sure to do everything we needed to keep our credit scores awesome. This let us not worry about rates, and helped with us getting approved for way more than what we were looking to spend. It's super important that you figure out what monthly payment you are
    personally comfortable with before you see your pre-approval number. Those numbers can end up being vastly different.

So, what's next? Well, we have to wait for the home to finish being built, go through inspections, and officially close on the home. There's still a lot to be done in the next couple of months, and I'm weary about getting truly excited until all of those events happen successfully. The first big step has been taken though, and I'm really excited to see what comes next.