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: Magic Cookie

Mortgage

We got a mortgage pre-approval letter today. We're considering making an offer on a house.

On one hand, it's a great house in my favorite neighborhood in town, with several neighbors we already know and like. It's spacious and is in move-in condition. Other than the lack of a garage, and maybe the size of the backyard, it's exactly what we're looking for. We've been keeping a close eye on the market for over six months now and have been waiting for the perfect place. This is the first one we both agreed we should put an offer on.

On the other hand, it makes me feel a little ill to consider borrowing more than the purchase price of our entire current house. This place is listed at just above the top of our price range, and there's probably not too much room for negotiation because the neighborhood is popular and houses rarely go on sale there. We can afford it now, but what if one of us loses our job, or decides to cut back or go to a lower-paying job or go back to school? What about all my student loans?

We could get a beautiful condo for $150,000 less than this house, even though it would be smaller (probably 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths instead of 5/2.5). We could easily make do with three bedrooms. We could even make do with our current two-bedroom house. The previous owner lived there her entire adult life, and brought up two boys there. It seems crazy to spend so much to get a single-family house, which are in short supply in our town.

It would be nice for baby #2, when that happens, to get a bedroom, and to have a place to put up our parents other than the basement, and to have some extra living space. It would be nice to have a place of our own instead of having upstairs or downstairs neighbors. It would be really nice to live on that street.

But $150,000 worth of nice? (I guess the $150,000 isn't a real number, since we'd probably just stay in our current house before buying a condo. But we might be able to spend $50,000 less and get something we liked. Not that we've seen that yet.)

After we walked through the house, I was sure we should put an offer on it. But seeing that number on the pre-approval letter is giving me pause.

Full post as published by Magic Cookie on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).