Hippocrates In San Diego

Opportunities may come…

Maybe I’m jinxing us by revealing this, but N. and I found a house that we would love to buy. We went to see it during an open house last weekend and things have moved quite quickly since then. We weren’t planning on buying until late summer or fall this year, because we needed time to save for a down payment, and N. will have a “real” job starting around August, after she graduates from residency.

But this house hit us like a ton of bricks… it’s in a perfect — I do mean PERFECT — location, is in great shape (about 18 years old, pretty new for this market), and is totally gorgeous. It’s also a bargain. For the quality of the house and neighborhood, it’s priced quite fairly (we think). Apparently the sellers are unable to keep up with the payments and are being forced to short-sell, meaning that they owe more to their mortgage lender than they can sell the house for, in the current market. So we’ve been scrambling way earlier than we planned to try to get a pre-approval done and to put together an offer with a friend of a friend who’s experienced in these types of sales.

However, after getting what we thought was a reasonable mortgage package from the bank, it turns out that this morning, the package has changed, because of the losses the bank has been taking with the recent mortgage crisis. So now the house may have a lot more up-front costs than we can afford at this point… and we’re afraid that we may not be able to put in an affordable offer in time before someone else buys the house. It’s that much of a bargain that we’re pretty sure someone else will buy this house in the coming weeks if we don’t move on it.