Starting the house hunt

It's like the stars are finally aligning or something!
My first contact with our Realtor today, over the phone. Got some excellent info from her today, as well as some names of mortgage lenders (whom we will be calling next week). We are meeting up with her next weekend to actually look at houses!

We're going to be looking in a few areas. See green areas on map below. The D and A are where we work. But we're going to keep things open incase our Realtor knows of a Gem of a neighborhood.

There are certainly a lot of good deals right now, so I don't think Alan and I will have any troubles finding a house we love.

**does good credit dance**

Wow...for the longest time, I thought I had bad credit...well, I probably did. Alan and I were starting to stress because we wanted to buy a house soon, but with the higher standards for lending, we thought we had a lot of work to do to boost the credit. We wanted to buy before June so we can get the tax credit.

Anyways, Alan got his report and score last week. After a bit of whining about MY score (I signed up for the credit monitoring and they have a "score"), we finally just paid the $$ to get my Official FICO score from Equifax. 673...I was flabbergasted. That's in the "Good" range...most importantly, that in the "I can qualify for a house" range! We ran the other 2 credit bureaus to make sure it was not a fluke...and it wasn't!

The next step is getting in touch with a mortgage broker. My co-worker's friend is a mortgage broker that works with FHA loans, so we will be talking with him soon. Our main concern is the difference in credit scores. We expect Alan's to be a lot better in a few months and mine would continue to raise if I pay down some things. If I can boost a few more points, that means lower interest rate. Im sure talking with him and getting information will put our minds at ease....and we could possibly be in a our own home sooner that we think!

MixedUpMarbles update

EDIT: Sorry Guys the original email was incorrect. Its "Forum" not "forums". My bad! I updated the link on this blog.
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Hey guys,

Due to a technical issue (Cox blocks port 80) I've had to create a temporary workaround to get to our website. This is only temporary and within a few days it should be working normally, but in the meantime, to get to the website you need to use the following address : http://forum.mixedupmarbles.com:8080

When you register and go to log in (or any time you log in after being logged out), the :8080 part will go away and you'll have to re-add it. However, once you are logged in, you don't have to keep re-adding it as it should be automatically added by the server. Worst case scenario, just use the above link and you'll get back to the main page.

I'll inform everyone when the DNS issue is fixed and there's no need to use the 8080 any longer.

So...in a nutshell
1. Go to http://forum.mixedupmarbles.com:8080
2. You should be able to register without any issue.
3. Next log in with your username/password and click on the log in button.
4. The page will show up blank, but thats okay, just go back to http://forum.mixedupmarbles.com:8080. It will put you on the index page, but you will be logged in and ready to view and post. You should not have to do the 8080 thing anymore during your visit.

Thanks!

Server down..

Looks like the server or something went down or something. BUMMER!

The cat probably chewed through a the internet cable or something. = ( Sorry about that! Anyways, Alan will fix it when he gets home, not much we can do about it during the day.

We'll get it up soon and it'll be fabulous!

Family Forum is back!

www.mixedupmarbles.com

As of Early morning 1/4/2009, the family forum is up and running! Alan and I made a project of it this weekend. We're even hosting it on our own server...so any problems and we can point straight to Alan, LOL/JK.

All friends and family are welcome with open arms! Spread the word.

I can't figure out....

how to get those really cool blog skins that my Sister-in-laws and other people have. Anyone want to enlighten me?