So my wife Priscilla and I have been talking about buying a house for a couple of years now.  After long discussions about where we want to live, what cities we like, and where we feel we can see ourselves settleing down, we decided that we both love Atlanta.  It’s a big city, but not too big.  It’s constantly growing with new hip, cool places to go to all the time.  Traffic blows, but it takes about a half hour to get anywhere in the city (without traffic).  It has nice neighborhoods, new neighborhoods, expensive neighborhoods, and a whole lot of ghetto.  There is a river, but no ocean.  Everything outside of Atlanta is at least four hours away from including the ocean, but Florida is right next door.  Tallahassee, Destin, Jacksonville, Savannah, Reighle, Charlette, Memphis, New Orleans, and Biloxi are all close enough to drive to.  It’s a five hour flight home to California, and a five hour drive to Priscilla’s parents house in Beaufort, South Carolina.  I think the biggest reason Priscilla and I love Atlanta so much is because it is neutral for the both of us, there is nothing we hate about it.  Plus we have a bunch of friends here and there is no reason to move.

Our journey began a few years back.  We had no idea where to start.  We just got engaged but we were not yet married and, as you could imagin, we were busy with a number of other things.  We asked our friends and family what to do first but we realized that none of our friends own their owned house.  We were lucky though becuase our friend Matt was friends with a realitor.  I wanted to do everything I could to learn about Real Estate before I actually bought something, so I wanted to get hooked up with a realitor as soon as possible.  

Brent Garrison taught us the beginings of Real Estate.  He hooked us up with a lender and we found out our price range.  At this point I realized why the economy and real estate business failed like it did.  We were aproved for some rediculous amount that would put our payments at over half our take home as a couple. Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to know a house and be broke because of it.  So we decided our price range was nothing more than $300,000 which is pretty normal for a starter home in Atlanta.  Our house hunt began.

Brent hooked us up with a series of emails every week with updates of new houses that come on the market.  We checked them out as they came, but nothing really caught our attention.  Priscilla and I were too caught up in everything else in our lives, so buying a house was soon put on the backburner.  We then decided to wait til after the wedding maddness was over before be began to dig into the house buying process once again.

to be continued…