want

[flea]

http://www.duke.edu/~sara/

Comments

[gchick.livejournal.com]

You know, right, that the looniversity credit union has a zero-down program? I mean, this house is kind of at the high end for around here, and M is in school and all that, so I know money can't be too plentiful, but if/when you're looking to buy, yadda yadda.

[makaidiver.livejournal.com]

There's never a good time to buy a house, I swear, but when you do it, you see that the whole system is set up to support the home buyer. I re-read the thing; the work was done by an architect/owner? Dude. That means the work was probably done right. I swear I'll shut and go away now! Just, wahh! it's really hard to find houses like that for sale out here, even at $750,000-$1,000,000.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, when we looked at buying right before I found out I was pregnant, the (well-recommended) mortgage people we talked to were not interested in giving us anywhere near what the monthly payment on that house would be. It's not the down payment that's the big hurdle for us - mr. flea used to have a well-paying job, and we'd been saving with a house in mind - it's the monthly. Even dual income, last year we earned little enough to qualify for the Looniversity's low income buy-a-house support for a single person. So, if we wanted to buy a not dissimilar house - though renovated on the cheap, corporately, in a much less fancy neighborhood (only 6 blocks away), we could do so for like $109K. (That last is just to shock MakaiDiver!)

[makaidiver.livejournal.com]

Did they do anything creative to try to jack up your ratios? I mean, on my salary, technically I don't earn enough money to buy anything except maybe a 1 car garage in Oakland. The bankers and realtors out here are geniuses as getting people to qualify. They justified adding in the cost of my benefits and the mandatory deductions for retirement to my "income" to push me to the very edge of eligibility to get me to qualify. Well over 50% of my income goes to housing, and that's common out here. If I'd needed it, I would have gotten a parent to co-sign.

Sorry, it must be my supersales-days coming back. It's just such a beautiful house!