Yay! I never thought I'd feel so strongly pro-owning after years of renting, but it's really awesome.

YAY!

As a licensed mortage broker (albeit too honest to profit in teh field)...YOU WILL NEVAH LOSE MONEY BUYING A HOME. No matter how much values drop; you will always be ahead of paying rent. Ownership is ownership, period. Best win:win scenario in America still.

Congratulations!

Congratulations!!!

Let me tell you, those times when you wake up in the wee small hours and wonder - Dear God, what have I done?....just think about the fact that you're never going to have to deal with a damned dirty rental agent, psycho landlord or scummy maintenance contractor who doesn't give a shit EVER AGAIN!!!

Of course there are going to be problems but it makes a difference when you deal with things yourself instead of being at the whim of a disinterested third party.

So, how does it feel to be the master of your own personal space?? :)

Ochhi, congrats to you and Ikky! My husband plunged into the housing market last year, and we couldn't be happier.

Congrats! Is your stomach doing flipflops?

That's so exciting! Congratulations! Are you going to revel in the house as-is for a while or do you already have plans to change some things? Either way, that's so great!

Yay! So jealous -- we've been on the house hunt since December and have been having nothing but terrible luck. The market in Chicago in our price range is totally crazy. We've seen over 60 houses and of those, four have been traditional sales (not short sales or foreclosures). We have had a short sale under contract for almost two months but are in complete limbo there with no information from the seller's side and no end in sight. We put an offer on another short sale and the sellers didn't even respond. (They haven't been paying their mortgage for a year but their bank is making no moves to kick them out, so can't say I blame them; but why did they put the house on the market?) We put an offer on a traditional sale last week - the house was on the market for 5 days, they had 8 offers on the table and despite bidding $30k OVER list, we did not get it.

We've upped our budget a bit and are now starting to see more traditional sale homes. We hope to make an offer on one by Tuesday, although it's priced kind of high and the seller needs to come down a lot.

Ugh, sorry for the rant... this has been all-consuming stress for 4 months now and it's wearing on us. We've all but given up hope on the tax credit and our landlord is requiring we sign a new 12 month lease so we'll have to sublet if something ever goes through.

I can't wait until I can make a joyful post like this. :) Good luck and congrats again!

w00t!

Thanks, all!

And yes, I am nervous as hell. Though I think part of that is we've been waiting waiting waiting to hear back from the sellers and back from the bank and back from the realtor and yadda yadda yadda, so I've been jumpy and nervous for the past two weeks and there's kind of that weird "letdown of nervous energy, but with no real place for it to go" thing going on.

Misskaz, that sounds super-stressful. Things are much slower here -- although we have been looking for a while, we never really felt like we had to rush into anything too fast. And luckily, California just passed a homebuyer's credit that will kick in when the federal one is set to expire, so that helped.

I will keep my fingers crossed for you and send out good offer-acceptance vibes :-)

Let me tell you, those times when you wake up in the wee small hours and wonder - Dear God, what have I done?....just think about the fact that you're never going to have to deal with a damned dirty rental agent, psycho landlord or scummy maintenance contractor who doesn't give a shit EVER AGAIN!!!

Hee. At this point, I'm mostly excited about not having to share walls with anyone. Our neighbors have been all about the high-bass explodey movies lately; I'm kind of over it by this point.

Oh, goodness, yes --- your neighbors! Double congratulations and happy thoughts!

Yay! I love owning my house; it's just so nice to be able to paint the kitchen orange and not even have to worry about what anybody else thinks. Congratulations!

Yeah, considering we told our landlord a week ago that the plumbing has backed up into our basement causing nasty raw sewage water to fill the laundry sinks and spill all over the basement floor... and I just went down there to see if I can do much-needed laundry this weekend and it's still a cesspool down there; well, let's just say I'm looking forward to the day that there isn't a "disinterested third party," as ninazer0 calls it, preventing shit from getting fixed. I'd rather be paying for it myself than smelling sewage in my home for a week and having to drag my sick ass to the laundromat just to have clean clothes for work.

w00t! Congratulations.

"when you wake up in the wee small hours and wonder - Dear God, what have I done?.."

When we took the leap, a friend advised that it would take about 3 months for the anxiety to subside. It turned out to be more like 4-5 months because I qualify for extended anxiety credits. But it does go away.

Congratulations!

"when you wake up in the wee small hours and wonder - Dear God, what have I done?.."

It's almost three years since we bought our house and I still think that almost every day. But hopefully you're not buying a 145 year old house that hasn't been renovated in at least the last 100 of those years. So far after replacing two bathrooms, most of the plumbing, 1/2 the wiring, the furnace, the hot water heater, the garage roof and the front stoop, it still looks like a dump but someday it'll be a palace. Or so I keep telling myself.

Awesome!

Congrats!

This is great news! It sure can be nerve-wracking, but so in my experience, yes, it's SO worth it! Yay!

Congrats!