Friday, July 9, 2010

Our Mobile Home Travails

Our next step in the mobile home buying came in finding a lawyer to write up a contract. I had nannied for a lawyer and got in touch with the law firm she worked for. She was no longer there but her boss was happy to work with us. We gave him all the information and that's when we found out banks don't like mobile homes, or more importantly, banks don't like lending money so that you can buy a mobile home. My first stop in the mortgage process was Sovereign, they had a list of three or four questions about the mobile home and when "our" mobile home failed the test we went looking elsewhere. I swear we contacted every bank in middlesex county. The banks told us one of two things,either no, or give us your first born, your life savings, and half of your pay for the next year and we'll think about lending to you. This would only be our first heartbreak.

House Hunting Here we Come

Looking back I'm not quite sure what we were thinking when we dove head first into house buying. We contemplated mortgages and decided on Sovereign Bank. I went to get us pre-approved and while my credit is rather stellar, sadly Marc's is not. Thankfully, I could still get a fairly decent mortgage on my own. The gentleman I spoke with told me I could be approved for $140,000(remember this number it will become important later). Not knowing any better I took his word and we began the house hunt...on our own. Why we didn't immediately try and get help I'm not sure. I got pre-qualified(We have since figured out this is the word to use, not pre-approved as I would have though) in November of last year and we began scanning craigslist and the those little house magazines you get for free at the supermarket. We hemmed and hawed and finally decided perhaps a mobile home was the way to go, again, not sure why. We found a few we liked and fell in love with the first one we saw. Sadly though, the mortgage plus the park fee's were out of our range so we continued looking. Marc smartly decided one day that we should take a drive through the park his cousin lives in. We found a cute little home that was for sale by owner, got in touch with him, and looked at it the next weekend. We immediately fell in love with it, and began the home buying process...or so we thought.

Some background...

Up until the age of 18 the farthest I had moved was the next room over. Then came college and after that I began bouncing from one apartment to the next, five apartments in the past five years to be exact, along with a short stint back at my parents house in the middle of it all. I never quite realized how much I moved until just now. In fact I think I've been in my current apartment the longest of any, that's simply because I don't want to move again, my next move will hopefully be my last for a few years. In pretty much every apartment I was in I knew it wasn't a long term thing and so I never was inclined to ask about painting or re-decorating in any way, I just lived with the way my apartment looked. But I'm getting tired of that. I look at paint colors longingly hoping one day to be able to paint my own bedroom a color of my choosing. I use to look at the ugly carpet and wish for hardwoods, and now that I have them part of me wishes for carpet again. I guess that's why when it came time to consider where my fiance and I would live when our lease was up it only made sense to both of us to purchase something and quit renting.