Our House Story

A little over a year and a half ago, Collin and I met with a financial advisor to talk about retirement, savings, and other things about money that made me anxious. He turned to us and asked us how much money we had in our bank accounts…. embarrassingly I said “$600.” I had just graduated college, we were renting downtown, and a month before that I had spent my last $60 on buying our cat. So how did we get where we are now– owning a home in the city & still traveling? Well, it’s an interesting story.

We closed on our home on July 27, 2017. We put an offer on our home on June 21. We had signed a contract with a realtor around one week before that. Crazy.

I remember sitting in our hostel in Switzerland one week prior, and saying to Collin “when we get back in the US, we should probably start getting serious about looking at houses.” We were both really tired of throwing our money away with our expensive rent every month. We started aggressively saving a bit from our paychecks and trying to learn more about buy a house.

A few days after returning home, we signed a contact with our realtor. We made our parameters really tight– we had a picture/plan of the house that we wanted to get and we were not willing to move out to the suburbs. Actually, we were not even willing to move out of our neighborhood. We were ok with waiting a few years before finding the place. Just a few days prior to this I had been talking to my supervisor, and she shared that she was finally closing on a home after looking for over a year and making multiple offers on our houses. Everyone kept telling us that it was a seller’s market, so we adjusted our expectations accordingly.

Well. We looked at two houses the following weekend, and neither were “our house.” One was too small (and we knew that we wanted to do the housemates thing) and the other was in awful shape with hoarders and several birds living inside. A few days later our house went on the market and we asked to check it out that day.

We pulled up to the house and as soon as I saw the house, my stomach dropped. I said to Collin “if I go inside, I’m going to love this house and want to make an offer on it.” My gut said that I should just not even go in, since we had planned to not actually buy a house for a few years. Collin joked that he was going to leave me behind, but eventually our realtor pulled up and we went inside. I zoomed through the rooms and floors while Collin & the realtor took their time. I met up with them and said “I want to make an offer on it.” Our realtor was shocked. He said to take some time to think about it and see if we could get approved for a mortgage that would cover this home (we had not even started the financial process of applying for a mortgage yet).

We drove away and I called my parents for their opinions, and Collin called the lender our realtor recommended. After getting off the phone, I was scrolling through Facebook and one of my friends (actually an old professor) HAD SHARED “OUR” HOUSE. I called him right away and asked if he knew the seller. His response was something like: “yeah, and you do too.” The seller was another professor from my alma mater.

We got approved for the mortgage in two hours. We met our realtor at a bar that night at 10pm to put together our offer. Naturally in my offer letter I mentioned that I was an alumni of the same school. 😉

The next day we found out that the offer was accepted. What a whirlwind.