Sorry for the long delay in posting. To answer the question many of you—OK, several of you—have been asking: No, we haven’t yet bought a house. We almost did. ( This one , if you’re interested. And this one was also tempting.) And we’re getting closer. But we remain renters.
Part of the issue, obviously, is that we haven’t found a place we’ve both liked enough to want to spend most of our life savings on. But part of the issue is also, I admit, a lack of urgency (mostly on my part).
(On mine, too. I’m happy with our apartment, our neighbors, our friends here. I like apartment living—being able to leave our door open and run down the hall to feed our neighbor’s fish or have that very same neighbor watch Joe while I’m running home from work. So what if the people upstairs use their exercise machine at 9 p.m.?—Nora)
Note I did not say a lack of desire: We’d like a bigger place, and will need one, and it makes sense for us, at this point in our lives, to buy. We have a pretty good idea of what we want, both in terms of house and neighborhood. We have savings. We have loan approval. We have a lawn-care catalog.
So what are we waiting for, you ask. (And if you’re a realtor, you don’t so much ask as shout it.)
A few reasons. One, prices are continuing to fall , and I don’t think we’re hurting ourselves by waiting. (Though I don’t think we’ll wait until 2010, despite this forecast .) Two, as Nora said, we like our current neighborhood, and we certainly can’t afford to buy here . But we can enjoy the sidewalks. Three, and most important, we have to find a place that all of us feel comfortable in.
(Michael, you might as well fess up: By the time we get into this place, there will be four of us.—Nora)
