House-Poor

Our house is officially on the market and we've started the task of looking for a new one. We looked at 5 houses today, all in our price range. And by price range, I mean being able to afford a mortgage and also eat (which in Fayetteville, that's a lot to ask for). Every single house we looked at could be classified as a dump. All needed some paint, a little love, and a call to a contractor. There was one house we looked at that was in fantastic shape. It reminded me a lot of my grandma's house. The only problem was it was too far from where we wanted to be.

So we're back to square one. Unfortunately we'll have to go up in price in order to get something decent. I really, really, REALLY don't want to over $95,000 for a house but we may have no choice. See, we have a really good mortgage rate now. But because of the whole mortgage crisis going on, even if you have excellent credit (which we do) you can't expect to get anything lower than 6% even if you use the VA loan. That will raise our payments significantly. And we don't want a house that's going to need work because as soon as Jason retires, we're outta here.

The whole situation is just a mess. I just want to find a decent house that I can move into--no muss, no fuss. But then again, I don't want to be house-poor either. We need to pick the lesser of two evils: Spend all our money on a house or spend all our money on gas. And believe me, what we spend on gas every month right now is enough for a whole nother house payment.