The first two days of this week saw me cheating on the diet a little bit - I’ve eaten a few Pop Tarts. But the good news is the “ice cream” I sampled from the refrigerator at work turned out to be fat free frozen yogurt. So I’m calling it a wash! I’ve been really hungry the past few days, not craving anything in particular, just yearning for that full feeling.

The point of this post is that my wife and I submitted a contract on a house yesterday. This came exactly 6 months to the day after signing the contract to sell our previous house. It’s a buyer’s market in the D.C. metro area, and we think we’ll be getting a great deal on the house. The property is “pre-foreclosure” so our contract is subject to bank approval, but the selling real estate agent said she believed we were within the acceptable range.

Our hopes are high, it’s a gorgeous brick end-unit townhouse that backs to common areas and a walking/bike trail. There is ample visitor parking very close at hand and the playground for the boys is directly across the street. The community is inviting and well maintained, our oldest son’s preschool is about 4 minutes down the road, and there is easy access to shops and commuter routes.

The lesson in this adventure has been a good one - keep your financial statements! Collecting all of the statements from creditors, retirement funds, pay stubs, investments, bank accounts, etc. is quite the chore. We were able to lock in to a good mortgage program in the nick of time, but we definitely scurried to get there. This is not a tremendous revelation, but we may need to look into getting a small filing cabinet and keeping it organized with our financial records. In this day and age of computers and a relatively paper-less work environment, I feel like hard copies are a nuisance most of the time, but when buying a home depends on them, they are critical.