This Week in Real Estate

So, Jason and I may be buying a condo on Tuesday.

We've been looking at the different real estate in the area since last year and we haven't found anything that was nice and within our price range. Then Jason stumbled across a place for about $75k, which is in our budget. It's 1550 square feet, in a nice secluded area, and is in good condition. It was forclosed and being sold under a HUD loan. I'm not entirely sure how the process works, but the bank collected bids until midnight yesterday and will review them all tomorrow. I honestly don't know what our odds are, but I'd like to think they're pretty good. We qualify for a conventional mortgage and can put down 3% without asking for a concession from the seller.

The place does need some minor work: patching holes, painting, replacing a few doors and shower heads. The princess pink and eggplant purple rooms definitely need to be repainted and the shag/berber/what-the-hell-were-they-thinking carpet definitely needs to be replaced. We'd need to get appliances right off the bat, but this means that we cane get the appliances we want right away and not deal with the inefficient crap we have now. Of course, we'd have to finance the new appliances, but Sears always offers 0% APR and with the amount of our budget that we currently put toward savings, I know we can pay it off in almost no time.

Of course, this is all dependent on the bank accepting our bid and our mortgage going through, so we'll see what happens.