Do it yourself

Hi, welcome to the group! (Although this group is set up more for information on improving your house, rather than how to buy one.) We bought a house last spring so I have just been through it all! My best piece of advice is: Go to your library ASAP and check out their house-buying section. (If you can't find it, ask a librarian, but there WILL be a section that has a lot of information on how to buy houses, how to find the house you want, mortgages, etc.) Then just allow yourself a month or two to check out lots of books from that section and wallow in them. :) What I found was that when I first got started doing my research, I was totally bewildered and had no clue what any of the terms meant. Then as I read, things started falling into place in my mind, and in a few weeks I felt I had a good handle on the whole process and was really ready to get started with an agent to look for a house. There is also a lot of information on the Internet, but most of it is buried in sites that want to sell you something. I preferred the library books because the information was more comprehensive, laid out better, and nobody was trying to sell me anything. As for estimating your monthly expenses, what I did was call up the utility companies in the area where I wanted to live, and asked them what average expenses were for a house the size I wanted to buy. (So if you think you can afford about a 1500 sq ft house, for example, you would ask the electric co. about that size house.) You can also call up your local tax office and ask them the same thing about property taxes, except that it will be based on the price of the house, not the size. Re FICO: yes, you should know your score before you get into serious mortgage shopping, and you can get it on the Internet for something like $14. But IMHO, there is no point in finding out what your score is until you have read up on it a little bit and know how your score will impact your ability to get a good mortgage. Also, you might want to look through the archives of this group for information on getting your prospective house inspected (when you are thinking about buying it). It is important to get a good inspector who knows what he/she is looking for, and even then they can miss things that will cause you grief. So it is good to have a handle on problem signs to look for. All that said, if you can afford to buy a house (and most people with a reasonable job can afford to buy SOME kind of house, even if it is tiny), it is almost always a better idea from a financial viewpoint to sink your money in real estate (i.e, your house) rather than just handing it over to your landlord every month and not getting anything back. So good luck with your prospective home owning!! Ann