Cancelling Our Gym Membership

With the purchase of our first home, my wife and I are looking to find any monthly expenses that we can cut back on in order to offset the impact of our new mortgage, tax, and insurance payment.  There isn’t a one size fits all answer or one expense that will magically offset this impact; however, we are going to do everything we can to collect a series of small victories to lessen the blow.  We found one piece of low hanging fruit, our gym membership, and decided to take a look at whether the expense was necessary or a luxury.

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Holy $%!? We Bought a House

Today is another chapter in the Dividend Diplomats mortgage series.   Time flies and surprises pop up where you least expect them.  I’ve written a lot about my house hunt recently, starting with reasons why my wife and I were not in a hurry to purchase a house all the way to the process of finding the institution that will provide us with the best mortgage.   We were always told that lightning strikes and when you find the right house, you need to move quickly.  Well, that was the case here and I could not believe how quickly things moved.  In all honesty, I’m a little shocked about it all here and I’m still finding myself trying to process what went down.  Mostly happy, with some doubts (as always), but her is the story about how my wife and I found our house.   I’m going to have a two-part series about this process – one about the purchase and one about some of my emotions/feelings after the offer was accepted.  So here is Part 1 of my mini-series!

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The 5 Most Important Factors for Us When Buying a House

If you haven’t picked up on this yet, after we stated earlier in the year we were not in a hurry to buy a house, my wife and I are beginning to ramp up the process for buying a house.  Wow is it a complicated, intense, and fast-moving process.   We’ve read articles, listened to countless hours of conversations with family/friends, and co-workers, and fallen asleep too many nights to HGTV in our effort to gather as much information as possible.  Buying a house is such a major life decision and we are going to take our time with the decision.   We are finalizing on our list of things that are the most important to the two of us and it only seemed fitting to whittle our list down to a five.

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