Yup.

That’s what I’m saying.

Well…that’s what Devon and I are saying.

As of this weekend, we’re “officially” (as if there is some sort of formal declaration that needs to be made) starting to save to buy a house.

Now, this isn’t something we’re planning on doing in a year or anything like that.  Our lease (which is oddly 15 months) is up in October.  So we’re planning on renewing for another 15 months.  Once the new lease is up, then we’ll see where we are savings-wise and determine whether or not we’re ready to buy then or if we want to wait a little while longer.  Plus, we want to have a pretty sizable down payment to try and help the monthly payment amount.

And before anyone asks….there is still going to be a wedding somewhere in there.  We’ve pretty much decided that we have no issue paying for the wedding ourselves and we also know what kind of budget we’re comfortable with in that regard.  That’s obviously separate from the house expenses.

We love our apartment, which is partially why we’re not in a hurry to move.  That, and we hate moving.  So, we don’t mind taking our time, finding a house we really love and making that a permanent place to live.

We’re thinking about locations.  We actually really like where we are, which is a huge step for Devon, Mr. “I’ll never live anywhere other than the east side of Baltimore County”.  So, we might stay in our general area.  Plus the schools near us are amazing and usually ranked as pretty high in the nation.  Since we’re both educators, our kids getting a good education is important to us.

We used the mortgage calculator on Zillow to get an idea of where our salaries put us in regards to how much house we can afford and our neighborhood and surrounding areas actually fit into that estimate, which is great.  If we do decide to stay in our area, we should be able to afford a pretty decent sized house.

We opened an account online over the weekend so that we can use that as a designated house savings account.  It’s a high yield savings account, so it’ll earn a little more interest than just a standard savings account.

This whole process is somewhat new to both of us, so I’d love to have some input from anyone who has experience in buying a house.  Is there anything else we should be doing right now? I’d love any and all feedback I can get!

Look at us, we’re all grown up and stuff.  Who knew THAT could happen….