Why move....

After my post on how we purchased a new home I received a concerned email that Matt and I were not making the best financial decision by purchasing a second home right now. I want to promise everyone Matt and I did not enter into this decision lightly – we discussed it and ran numbers for months – seriously. We also looked at homes for over seven months before finding the place for us. It has the right qualities, the right location and of course the right price, but there are other perks as well.

Less gun confusion
Some of the reasons we decided it was time to move were financial and some where not. In my last post about the issue I said our new place was in a much better neighborhood and I wasn’t exaggerating about the gun shots. This summer we had three shootings within a two mile radius of our home. The convenience store is robbed once a month on average – not kidding; it’s time for us to get out.

There are also financial things to consider. While we did basically drain our “dream/retirement” savings account (or will after updates) I’m ok with it because one of the first things we said we wanted to do with that money was to purchase a new “forever” home, which now we’ve done.

Great Prices
Yeah, I’ll admit I wish we would have had a bigger down payment saved but the house was a serious steal. We purchased our new home for about $40K less than all the similar homes in the area and in total it is only $20K more than our current home. I’ll pay $20K more to avoid the gun fire. Even with this new purchase we can still make all of our bills on one income (after we sell our current home). Until we sell our house we’ll continue to pay all our bills with Matt’s income but rather than put my entire pay check into savings $600 will come out to make our current house payment.

Good Mortgage News
Since our new home is the perfect home for us and we plan to be there for a quite a while I’m excited to start working on paying off the mortgage and our student loans early, they are the only debts we have left. (I’m thinking some big progress on this in 2010).

2009 – $12K savings goal
One thing we have had to face is the fact we are not going to make our $12,500 savings goal for 2009. We’ve put the money into our down payment, closing cost and updates to both homes.

I thought I’d be more upset about missing this goal but really I’m ok with it. I’m sure when the year is over we’ll still have saved way more than we would have had with no goal this year at all. We still have a great car and emergency fund that’s growing every day – and we have no plans to touch any of that money.

I think in 2010 we’ll try to save $10,000, not because I don’t think we can do $12,000 but because $10 in ’10 has such a nice ring to it… yes I’m very OCD.

Timing
And lastly we also considered the timing – not just for the market conditions but also our situation. Matt and I would like to have children in the next year and I figure it’s best to take the plunge of buying and selling a home while we’re both working full time than having to worry about it when we might be in a more difficult financial position.

Ok – this is turning into a long post but I wanted to just let everyone see that we really did put a lot of thought into this decision and this is just a small sampling of what we considered when deciding to buy – now you see why it took so long.

And I have some big plans for this house – all of which you’ll be along for the ride for, but those are quite a while in the future.