Marriage'd!

Well, the day has finally come and gone - Fiance got an upgrade to Husband. People keep asking me if things feel different now, but I really can't say they do. (Of course, my stock answer to this is "Yes, now the police have to return his dead body to me." and Husband's stock answer is "Yeah, her mother is moving in next month and she took all my money." Just gotta be smartasses.) We've been living together for eight years and have always had very commingled lives, so I don't think things will "feel" any different until we hit another real milestone, like buying a house together or having a kid. Things continue on as they were.

 On that front, we have started considering what we need to do for our next steps in life. We're not sure yet if we should have the kid first or move first. Our house is pretty small - about 1000 square feet - and we would literally have to remove furniture in order to have anyplace to put a crib. I don't want to get sucked into the "babies need all kinds of specialized stuff" vortex, since many babies did just fine getting changed on a regular table or the floor or bed for thousands of years, and diapers just went in the trash, but they do need SOME stuff and we don't really have any room to put it. Unless the baby wants to live in the living room, since that is the only room that has space in it currently. Maybe the baby just wants some space, ok??

Anyway. So the way things are going in our local real estate market, we are probably not going to get any money back out of our house. Or if we do, not a ton. Right now best case scenario is getting a price about $15-20k more than our mortgage balance - but after the 6%, cost of moving, etc, we would end up with at best a few thousand bucks. And since we got the $7500 homebuyers' incentive way back when, we have to repay it. You have to pay it off $500 a year through your tax return, and then whatever is left comes out of the profits of the sale if you aren't there for 15 years. So if we make any profit, some of it goes to the government anyway, and there would likely be none left for us at the end of the day.

The short answer here is that we have to save up for a down payment again. We have an FHA mortgage now, on which you only put down 3%, and I guess we could get another, but there are a lot of fees associated and I'd rather not if we don't have to. The other end of the timing is that based on my current estimates we should both be debt-free other than student loans by the end of 2014, and since we both make decent salaries and have good credit, we might be able to get a normal, non-FHA mortgage at that point. Plus we are both saving, and should have at least some money to put down. The wedding cost more than we were planning on (though we were not off by far) so we do not have as much in savings left as we'd like, but we'll build back up.

The biggest impact of getting married, for me, was that because I am changing my name, I have to get new EVERYTHING. Comically, only one credit card company actually requested proof of ID with my new name. So it's a good thing not too many people have my first name or it would be a lot easier to steal my identity. I think my health insurance and medical records are going to be the biggest hassle, but I have a LOT of accounts around the internet and I am probably going to be changing those for years to come. Apparently I'm more on top of it than others though - the lady at the bank said a lot of people don't even bother for up to a year. Sheesh!