The beginning of home hunting

We spent the second half of spring break in the Dallas area hanging with friends and looking for a home. We checked out two apartment complexes and talked to a mortgage guy. No offense, but apartments are just lame. We only looked at two, but they were highly rated on apartment finder. Why would I pay someone $1000+/month for a teeny kitchen?? It just seemed silly. I'm pretty sure that we would have to sell 30% of our belongings before we fit into one of those.

The meeting with the mortgage guy went great! I was very impressed about how much they will let us borrow just based on Adam's salary (because we don't have a number for mine yet). And then I was even more impressed when we realized how big of a house that would buy in this fantastic home market. We are pretty much sold on buying a house, now we just have to figure out the logistics. It's like a multi-variable optimization problem... if only one of us had taken optimization. It is just like Dr. Hurtado tells me, life is a two point boundary value problem and we are just trying to figure out the path between the end points.

The problem is that we have no savings and our mortgage guy says we have to pay at least 3% down on closing. We will have that money once Adam starts working because they were so sweet to offer him a signing bonus. So then we wait until after he starts, but where will we live until then???? Also: When do we start really looking for houses if we aren't closing until August? Who knows a real estate person that we can trust that knows the Grand Prairie area? 1 million other questions... to much to think about now. It is fun to see who can find the cheapest and best house online. Did you know that google maps has a real-estate feature. Very helpful!!