The Big Question: What can we actually afford?

Even before we were pre-approved by our lender we had a plan, search in a price range that would keep our mortgage payment equal to or below one of my wife's paychecks. This was important since she has a normal job, but with my job I can have a great month and sell multiple homes or have a horrible month and not sell any. We needed to look at my income as a bonus. This plan is great in theory.

We waited with our eyes closed imagining the horrible dumps we were going to be looking at, since we were confident we wouldn't get approved for much. Once we received our pre-approval, our plan went right out the window. We started out looking at homes that fit into our plan and most of these homes were the tiny "repair everything" homes we had imagined. Soon we were mixing in homes that were priced a little bit higher and then homes that were a little bit higher than those.

This is a huge problem that a lot of first time home buyers have and since I do this every day, I should have known better. Suddenly we had found a home we were ready to make an offer on at the top of what we had been approved for, almost double the monthly payment we had planned for! We were about to make a huge mistake. We were about to make ourselves house poor...

First Post

Hi! My name is Brian and I am a real estate agent, newlywed and first time home buyer. I work for Keller Williams Real Estate company and do most of my business in the Tacoma/Gig Harbor area. I just got married to my beautiful wife Anna in April and we are currently in the processes of purchasing our first home.

I hope for this blog to be an informative and entertaining dialog about the real estate market, life change and whatever else happens to us as we try to do everything at once. Here we go...