Rae Talks to a Lending Agent

Okay, so things are going okay. Mentally, I'm still a little out of it, I'll admit. Work is going well, but I'm still stressing myself out thinking about all this stuff. Last night I couldn't sleep from thinking about just how impossible everything feels right now, even after the progress I have made. I ended up freaking out and crying (the hormones probably didn't help) and got up with husband to watch Bob's Burgers and eat juice pops we got at Costco. It was nice to just regress a little bit.

And you know, I'm okay with being weak like that here and there. It'll probably happen again. I'm human, and intensely fallible. I'm no fantasy blogger with only good habits sharing her wealth of knowledge with the world. I'm just some schmuck with an internet connection.

But things really are going okay. I've got a 3-day streak of practicing my harp (and doing my back stretches right afterwards because short arms = back pain when you're reaching forward for a half hour plus), and I'm working on my callouses. Here's the main plotline for this post, though: today, I actually went to go see that lending agent I was planning on talking to.

It was an interesting conversation. The most interesting piece, I think, is that he ran the numbers and based on our combined income, husband and I could afford a monthly payment of $1313 if you include principal, interest, taxes, etc., which would allow us about a $150k house. That surprised me, tbh. Like it isn't all that bad, and there are actually more options than I realized.

1. We could take our time and save up more money. Which we should probably do anyway. I really need to settle down on the house goal and prioritize setting up a better emergency fund and getting it into a high-interest online savings account.
2. We could apply for down payment assistance from the city. The only issues are that we would just need to stay in the house 5+ years, and to be honest we'd probably still need more income to get the size of house that we want (3 bed/2 bath, single family home with separation from neighbors is $200k+ around here). And higher income probably = less chance to qualify for that grant. Unless we had a larger family and the same income levels. Hm.
3. We could move way out to BFE and go for a 100% USDA loan. We're still at low-moderate income levels for this metro area (I think we just now hit the "moderate" level with my raise) and there are some eligible areas in some parts of north Austin that we were considering anyway.

The guy also let me know that if we want to move out of this unit in April, we would want to apply for pre-qualification in November/December, which gives us plenty of time to decide if that's the right time for us. And that we would then want to start house-hunting in January 2017 at the latest. He actually suggested that I check with our apartment complex to see if we could get out of our lease early, which was... weird. I dunno. He needs to hit his numbers I guess.

And then there's all the stuff we need. 1 year's worth of W2s, 60 days of bank statements, 30 days of paystubs, and any recent tax returns. Easy enough to collect once we're ready for all that. I'm okay about organizing that kind of thing, for the most part.

That covers all my notes from the meeting. I think it went well enough, and helped me get some ideas to mull over instead of this big conceptual mass of money that I'll never get. There are options. I just need to roll them around in my head, talk to husband, figure some things out. We'll get it done.