Journey through my experience

So this blog is going to be so that you all can accompany me on my journey though the most difficult first time home-buying. I am starting a little late, though I wish I had been blogging it from the beginning- the idea was just given to me by my realtor- Crawford.

Somewhere along the way, January of '10 I think it was- I got an inkling of the idea for me to buy a house. It started with some personal finance books- Capitalist Pig, think and grow rich, etc then moving into books about real estate- Creating Wealth, First Home Buyers and many books on mortgages and a good portion of what you need to know before you commit to buy the house.

I looked to get pre-approved, called 2 places, and started looking for houses. The first round was newspaper and driving around the area I thought I might want to live. At the beginning, you have no idea what you really are going to end up with or what you value the most- as time goes on, the more houses you see, you realize what you like and don't like, need and don't need, want if possible and don't want if possible and things you can live with if everything else is perfect.

I looked at some short sales. What does that mean? Well at the time, it meant you are not closing for 6 months and the house is probably in disrepair. Driving around is probably the worst way to find houses that are on sale. Houses, frequently, are going to already be under contract or the realtor will be hard to reach, you will do a ton of cold calling. I started looking into zillow.com (thanks to friends Trey and Lisa) I spent hours between zillow and google maps (suggested by another friend)- this is fun when youre addicted to looking for houses, but again not most productive.

I finally spoke with a friend of mine who is a realtor and asked him to realtize for me, Crawford. And thus the process began, late January.