House buying sucks. It's a buyer's market, but we buyers are all vying for the same good deals – two others disappeared right from under our noses earlier in the week – and trying to make the tax incentive deadline. This is a horrible time to learn the process: we're first-time buyers. After the hundreds of man-hours spent combing through the listings – I'm uber picky – and touring just about a dozen homes, we decided to bid on a house Wednesday evening. I tell you, the suspense of waiting to hear back from the sellers was intense, who knew it could be so excruciating? The sellers pretty much waited until the last possible moment – we set a deadline on our offer – to reply. Not thirty minutes after our new offer, which didn't quite meet them halfway, their agent deigned to tell us that they have another bid, are we sure about our counter-offer? Of course, we'd already been at the shady deals and shady real estate agents and horror stories talk for hours, when we didn't hear back right away, so we're thinking they're trying to scare us into going higher by using a possibly-phantom second bidder, or the agent stalled for so long because the agent is representing both the seller and this second bidder; the conspiracy theories could go on ad infinitum. The whole process – and we're only at the v. beginning! – has really turned me off from the idea of home buying, not that I was so enthusiastic about it in the first place, as a means of satisfying some American dream. Anyway today being St Joseph's feast day, we're confident that he will intercede on our behalf to give us an answer, to close this thing up, to our benefit, whether that means the house will be ours or not.
