by Julie Thrice

Created on: May 07, 2008

My husband and I just bought a house. It's a cute little house, way out in the country. What a scary process!

First you go to the bank and tell them you want to borrow some money from them; way more money than you make, so much that it will take you 30 years to pay them back. The bank says, "That's fine. As long as you provide us with every detail of your financial history." That didn't take us very long. What did take a while was convincing the bank that we really did want to buy a house, not a condo, not a mobile home. Once we did that, the bank said, "You'll need to agree to pay us an arm and a leg in addition to the price of the house! Oh, by the way, sign all these papers and give us some money."

We found a realtor who was willing to spend a lot of time with us. In fact, we couldn't have gotten rid of him if we'd wanted to. That is, until he found out how little we were qualified for, then we never heard from him again!

Then you have three months to find a house. This is the hard part, especially if you can't afford the going rate for a decent house. We thought the Internet would help a lot but all the sites that specialized in cheap or foreclosed homes said, "Sure, we'll help you out, just sign this user agreement and give us some money." I don't get that, if you don't have a lot of money for a house, why would you have money for an Internet search? We found LOTS of million dollar houses though!

We discovered that in our price range, you either have to buy a foreclosed home that has been torn apart (literally!) or find one out in the boonies. We choose the boonies, as neither of us are very handymanly! When you finally find that one special house that you want to buy, you tell the agent so. They say, "OK, I'll see if it would be alright for you to buy it. Oh by the way, sign all these papers, and give me some money."

Then you want to get the house looked at to make sure it's not going to fall to pieces as soon as you move in. So you call an inspector, who says, "Yeah, I'll look at the place, if you sign these papers and give me some money." Then the bank wants to look at the house too, so they tell you, "We need to look at the house, so sign these papers and give us some money."

Finally, all parties involved say that it would be OK for you to buy the house. You go into the Title Company, where they sit you down and say, "Congratulations on buying a house! Now sign this ream of papers and give us a boatload of money."

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