The Buying Process - 25 to Life: Property 1

In the midst of all this saving, I contacted realtors in my top 2 cities of choice. I went to look at houses during my time off from work. It only took a couple of weekends for me to decide the perfect location. Once I figured out which house I wanted to buy, I immediately put down an offer and waited to hear back from the seller. If you're an indecisive person and you take too long put down an offer, someone else might put an offer on the property you like and you end up going with your second choice. . . or maybe you end up with nothing at all.
         The seller's counter-offer was $3000 more than I wanted to spend so I brought up some problems I saw on the property. I asked the seller to either fix the problems OR just sell it to me at my offer price. It would've probably taken up too much of their time to fix the issues - or maybe it would've cost them more than the discount I asked for. Either way, we agreed on my offer price.

List Price: $137,500
My Offer: $130,000
Counter-Offer: $133,000
Final Sale Price: $130,000

How Did I Finance the Property?

I paid down 20% of the sale price because I wanted to avoid mortgage insurance. Mortgage insurance is just a penalty for being broke. The mortgage company charges you extra money each month, just in case you lose your one little job and can't pay them anymore. At least they got some money out of you up front. So any-who, 20% of $130,000...

Downpayment: $26,000
Mortgage Loan: $104,000

My monthly payment was $744. Nice, right! But it went up since homie took office in 2016.

Stay tuned to hear about property #2.