First Heartbreak

It was bound to happen. I fall in love with the idea of a house on paper and it gets snatched up before we can even go see it! We had an appointment to see a very nice house in a great neighborhood this Sunday. When I checked my listings today, the house was gone. Upon further investigation, the status had changed from Active to Contingent. I hate the "C" word!I guess it is bound to happen to us. It seems people everywhere are rushing to buy a house by the end of this month so that they can close within 30-days and get that $8,000 stimulus payment from the government.

E & I wanted to take our time and look at a lot of houses, a lot of neighborhoods and get a feel of what is important to us. Even if we find the perfect house this month, we don't want to go into contract until December, and our ideal closing date is sometime in early-March. Now I am getting nervous that come October 30th all the good houses will be snatched up by people rushing for the $8K.

Perhaps it would have been a better idea to wait until the end of the year to start looking, but we were too excited when we saw the pre-approval and the nice listings started to come in. What is one to do? Should we join the crazies in rushing the process for the sake of $8,000? Or should we stick to our plan and keep going slowly to make sure we know exactly what we want, knowing that we will likely miss out on great houses?