Here We Go!

I wanted to start a separate blog to chronicle our process as first-time home-buyers. It has been a long road, and who knows who much further we have to go!, but as far as we're concerned, we've already reached our goal: having our finances and credit in order so that were are even able to secure a loan to purchase our first house.

Let's see. The story starts a looooong time ago, but I'll start it in November 2006. That was the month that Matt and I decided to get serious-- like, REALLY serious, about our family's future. I picked up a book called "The Total Money Makeover" by Dave Ramsey and most of it really sonated with me. I decided to put his "snowball" process in to effect to use for paying off our debts. Our goal, our distant, seemingly unattainable goal, was to get our credit in a place that we would be approved for a home loan.

We worked, every single month, paying hundreds of dollars to our creditors. While we trudged through the process of contacting creditors and sending off our hard-earned money every month we also took a few extra steps towards improving Matt's credit score. This process continued for well over a year in to the Spring of 2008 when I started really getting a bee in my bonnet about being a homeowner. I started to hear rumblings of how people with less-than-perfect credit could still get home loans and thought, well, I should look in to this, what have we got to lose?

I was advised by a mama from the MDC message board to attend a home buying seminar that was something like six hours long on a Saturday afternoon. There I met a great mortgage broker and real estate agent. After the seminar was over we were asked if we wanted to have a private meeting with the mortgage broker and we agreed. He came to our home and sat down with us and began the process of looking over our financial picture, which had two sides: on the one side we made enough money to qualify for a loan, on the other side our credit wasn't good enough to qualify for a loan. He determined that the best loan for us would be an FHA loan, and working with him we began the next stage of process to clean up our credit.

This stage brought with it another mountain of work. We kept feeling like we were getting close to our goal, only to find out that we still had to do x,y and z. During the beginning of this process two really important things happened: 1. We got married, and 2. The market crashed. Both of these events were key players in our process. The wedding gave us a little bit of a financial boost towards our goal and the market crash?, well, homes that last Spring were totally out our reach, financially, are now completely attainable. We were forced to sit and wait, the whole time watching interest rates drop and wonderful homes in our price range come and go from the housing market. And we kept chipping away towards our goal of being able to qualify for a loan.

We met with our mortgage broker again in person in early 2009. He walked us through the credit report again and had some wonderful news: we were actually very, very close to our goal. We had only one more giant hurdle and we were there! As we had been working on this process the qualifications for getting an FHA loan had gotten more and more strict, but we were still meeting the expectations and were doing great.

A couple of months ago we finally paid off the last big loan that we needed to in order to have our credit report look exactly as it should in order to qualify for our loan. Then we waited. And waited. We needed to get proof from the creditor that this debt was paid off and had great difficulty in getting anything out of them. Finally, though, last Friday, we got the letter that we were waiting for: the debt had been settled. Later that day we were told what we have been working our asses off for: that we could get our loan and could start looking for a house!