You’ll have to wait a while for this one, but you can now pre-order Kinect Star Wars for Xbox 360. 
One other benefit to us buying a new house, is that our living room will be much better set up to use Kinect. For those that need to play a Star Wars game sooner than December 2012, there is Star Wars: The Old Republic
I’m sure that we have all heard people say things like “I’ve been a member of ___ party for ___ years.” Replace the blanks with either Republican/Democrat and the some long amount of time. I think those days should be in the past, and Americans should consider a new idea. When a Democrat is in the white house, all Americans should register with the Republican party, and vice versa.
Why?
The reason is simple. Imagine that you had to choose between two candidates for president. You decide which one you would prefer pretty easily. Now, would you prefer the second candidate to be the polar opposite of your choice, or would you prefer them to me as similar as possible?
That is basically the system that we live in. If you want to vote for Obama in November, is it worth of a few moments of your time to change your party and vote in your primary? Now a days most states have forms to fill out on their web sites to register with a different party.
You may be of the opinion that none of the Republican candidates are remotely close to Obama. That’s your opinion to have, and if you’d like, you can take this concept and implement the opposite strategy. If you are so certain that Obama is the right choice, then you could register in the primary to try and nominate the least electable candidate. That’s also your freedom in our system.
So many new characters to will be introduced this season. If you haven’t read the books, you would probably think you are watching a different show entirely. Can’t wait.
The first step of home buying starts with your mortgage. I know that’s boring, but well, it’s the truth. You can’t buy a house without one, and you can’t even seriously look. The pre-approval process is similar here in California to that in Massachusetts. It also starts with finding a mortgage lender and talking to them about what you are looking for. If you don’t know any personally, a good place to start is your bank. In our case, we are members of Keypoint Credit Union, so I decided to fill out the form on their web site.
Within a day or so I was contacted by Ross Huffman and we talked through what we were looking for (single family home), our time frame (sometime in the new year), and price. Once we had gone over all of that, Ross let us know what kinds of documentation we would need in order to get our pre-approval letter. Most realtors will ask their clients to have a pre-approval letter if they are going to go out and show them properties. It makes the process easier if and when you find a property that you want to buy.
The few things that you will need are:
With those key items, your mortgage lender will be able to determine how big of a mortgage you could afford. Then you can decide if you are comfortable with borrowing that much money and what your monthly payment would be. It’s possible that based on your salary and the amount of debt you have, that you might qualify for a larger mortgage than you would feel comfortable with. These are all topics that you can discuss with your broker.
The entire pre-approval process does not take very long. A good mortgage lender should be able to give you an idea of what you will be pre-approved for just by having a conversation with you, so long as you are honest with them about how much money you earn, have in savings, and the amount of debt you have. The full process can take a few days, depending on how long it takes you to provide all of the information to your mortgage lender.
So now that you know your price ceiling, it makes part 2 of the process a lot easier. In the next couple of days, I’ll post part 2. Selecting your search radius.
Big news. Stacy and I are buying a house in San Jose. I don’t want to reveal too many of the details, because I thought it would be fun to write a series of posts about the process. Needless to say there are many things that are different about buying a home in California than in Massachusetts where we bought our condo.
So this is just a teaser of what’s to come.
Apple did pretty well last quarter.
