We bought a Town House!

We started looking at properties in May with our trusted real estate agent and the market was moving fast.  Everything we looked at and liked was gone in 24 hours.  We got pre-approved to make things go faster but due to our nature of wanting a night to think and pray about a home we continued to lose out on every property.  Some might have been due to not having a decent down payment, our money was still tied up in the property we bought in 2015 so we only had 3.5% to put down and sellers like to bet on a buyer who will be able to complete the deal.

I had set my heart on 120K as the price we needed because I wanted my mortgage to be just under 1K so that we could afford to make 1.5 payments. 

This is one of the reasons houses were going so fast as we were looking in this low range.  Homes either needed tremendous work, no thanks, already tried that, or they were snapped up extremely fast.  We tried looking upwards to 150K but I was very reluctant to move forward and lost several homes in that range as well. 

At church one day, we let a friend know we were looking for a house and they just happened to be selling their townhouse.  I was really hoping for a bigger yard and stand alone house, but their price was 120K, 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and recently renovated.  I literally had no compelling reasons to say no, in fact, it really did seem like heaven opened this opportunity just for us.  Our friends put us in touch with a fantastic mortgage broker who we absolutely adored working with, Integrity Home Mortgage Byron Reed, these guys were incredibly easy to work with, highly enthusiastic and encouraging.  They made it fun to buy a house.

There is a bit of work to do throughout the home to finish the renovations that our friends did, but it's very livable and we can get these things done over time.