We ve been considering buying a home for a while now--mostly because we have three animals and it's hard to find rentals that will let you have them and also because we hate the costs of moving every year and we re having bad luck with neighbors in apartment complexes. We re young, and this would be our first home together. We plan on staying in this home for at least five years as we build connections at our first jobs out of college, but do eventually want to move out of state when we feel we re ready for a family. So our lease on our apartment is up at the end of September, and we ve recently been preapproved for a 30yr fixed mortgage, but with the houses moving so fast in our area we re not sure when to start looking. Now, or later? Our pre-approval letter is good for 90 days. When should we put an offer on a house (if we find one we love) to be able to move into it if the banker says it ll take 2-4 weeks? We also can't break our lease early and don't want to do month to month after September, preferably.
Also, any tips would be helpful as we re not sure of what direction to go in next.
Added (1). We have a good credit sore (banker said it was in the top one percent of our age range), have a down-payment, stable jobs that we've had for almost 2 years and are pre-approved--we're just not sure how long the actual buying process is to know when to start looking.
Read more: How early should we start seriously looking into buying a home?
