Engagement Time!

So I may have stressed that I had to get the ring before my roommate proposed, but once my girlfriend caught wind of the possibility of an engagement ring, I could not hear the end of it. I didn't want to steal my college roommates thunder so I told him I would wait until after he proposed.

Now I am publishing these stories retroactively, so I am still a few months behind... but we are up to April at this point in the story line.

My college roommate decided on Easter, he put the ring in an egg and had her find it. It was cute, it was brilliant, she didn't expect it. Shit. I can't compete with that!

She knew I had the ring, the element of surprise was not on my side.

The thursday after he proposed I invited my girlfriend over for dinner, not to propose, just dinner. I don't normally cook for her so she was excited for reasons I did not immediately understand. Thursday came and I forgot that I had promised to help my current roommate move into his new apartment. So around six we started moving his stuff to the new place, the girlfriend got there at seven while I was still out moving my friend. At 8:30 I called and told her I was running late and asked her to cook dinner if she was hungry. By the time I got home at 9:30 she was PISSED.

But it was just dinner? How was I supposed to know she expected a romantic candlelit meal with me proposing to her? I mean, I MAY have only cooked her two meals in the entire five years we had been dating, and I MAY have led her to believe that it would be an intimate dinner, but plans change I guess. If this were "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo" a red haired kid named Red Herring would have come out of nowhere and berated her for thinking it was happening tonight.

What a dick

The next day I told her I would take her out for dinner, and I prefaced by stating that "just because I do something slightly romantic does not mean I am going to propose" she understood, we both apologized for the night before.

We went to Sullivan's Steak House, an upscale restaurant located in the Inner Harbor. We decided to walk over since my current house is about two miles away. It is a beautiful walk along the Ritz Residences sea wall that overlooks the bay. We ate our meal at the restaurant, I decided to get the most expensive thing on the menu. I mean, you only get engaged once, what's a $90 ribeye in the grand scheme of things?

A LOT, the answer is a freaking lot. Who charges that much for a steak? I mean, that thing should have been covered in diamonds and tasted like orgasm.

After dinner the waiter asked us if we wanted desert, "Um, I'm pretty full, what about you?" My girlfriend said she was alright, but it looked like her heart sank when she realized there would be no epic romantic gesture with a ring on top of a piece of cake or creme brulee or whatever I ordered.

This image just seemed perfect

So we started our walk back and she once again looked defeated, I guess my earlier statement of not getting engaged had fallen on deaf ears.

About half way around the sea wall I stopped to tie my shoes, slipped the ring out of my pocket and asked her. She was completely shocked, started tearing up and said yes. I had asked the real estate agent for the lock box combination to our house earlier that day, so we walked there to make the phone calls.

Champagne waiting in the refrigerator, I owned the situation.

And Now I'm Completely Broke

So there I was at the dinner table, my excitement had just been crushed via text message. I had to make big moves towards an engagement ring or the resulting fallout would be worse than a Michael Bay movie if my old roommate got engaged.

Disclaimer: I absolutely love my girlfriend she means the world to me, the idea of engagement was absolutely fine with me, and if I had the money it would have been done years ago, but I wanted to wait on a proper ring that she deserved, not just any old thing.

The very next day I went to Jared, it was time to start looking for a ring, I wanted to go shop some prices and see what I could finance at different stores.

So I walked in, it was my first time in a proper jewelry store in my entire life. Not to say I have not bought my girlfriend jewelry before, but it had always been from little boutique stores, never a store of this magnitude. As soon as I told the lady that I was looking at engagement rings I was ushered to a back room where they went over the basics of engagement rings and diamonds.

This was a factory of salesmen.

Like this, with diamonds

I told them my ideal price range and they showed me through my options as far as diamond size and clarity goes. Every diamond in Jared is virtually perfect to the naked eye, and since I didn't expect the gawking public to bust out a magnifying glass when it was shown, size was really the only concern in the store. I was shown a diamond, and promised that it was the best deal "ever". So I started looking at settings, originally set on a solitary setting. They changed my mind.

So here I was, about to make a down payment on a house and presented with a ring that costs roughly as much. I knew I only had money for one at the time, but figured what the hell and bought both.

They sold me.

I don't really have any pictures of the ring from this period, so here it is during our engagement shoot. It's on top of a godzilla action figure because... why not?

So I went in with the idea of looking around for a few minutes and leaving, I walked out with the freaking ring. A store full of salesmen and women had just made a sucker of me, I loved the ring but damn did they take me for a run.

So I had to start saving all over again, I had two months before I needed to come up with a down payment and monthly ring payments to boot.

Coming Up Next: "Engagement Time!"

We Are Getting A House! Part 2

And now, for the thrilling conclusion of the "We Are Getting A House!" Series


So where were we?

Right... So the price was still out of our range, but we kept our eyes peeled for another drop, just in case.

The drop never came.

We heard the bank was about to freeze the property. So we asked the real estate agent what that meant,  he told us the bank would be taking it off the market for about a year and it would be unavailable for purchase. Seemed like an odd strategy for selling a house, its like a restaurant closing for a year and assuming that sales would continue to grow while it is closed.

Genius!

So we decided to throw our hat into the ring (is that the expression?) and start making moves towards putting a lower offer in, but since the house would be frozen in a week, we had to move fast.

We went to Wells Fargo to get pre-approved for the house, which went well. They said we could easily afford a 150k house payment but when we looked at the monthly mortgage it just didn't look like it was in  the cards for us, especially considering how high Baltimore taxes are. We set out to spend at MOST 125k, which would put us at the same amount for renting an apartment in the area.

So the day before the house was scheduled to be frozen we put in a bid of 115k, and the bank countered by lowering their offer from 147k to 143k. They didn't want to budge much, and our real estate agent told us that was about as low as they would probably go. We sent back our counter offer of 118k that night around 8 o'clock and got a return email saying they would need to contact their supervisor, so we went to sleep not thinking there was a chance in hell of us actually getting the price lowered to our range.

The next morning, the last day the house was on the market, we received an email which said they would meet our asking price of 118k (they must have been desperate to get rid of that house). We got the house!

Oh wait.

We were told that since this house was owned by Bank of America we had to be pre-approved by them in order for the deal to go through.

Before the house was frozen.

We had until the end of the day.

So here I was at work on the construction site with no vehicle of my own and I needed my documents in order and to meet with a bank agent before the bank closed at 5. I was frantically calling everyone in the area trying to get my documents in order and getting a bank agent to see me when I got off work. Amazingly, we got off work at 4:00 PM, I raced over to my house, grabbed my documents, and ran to the Bank of America office where I met my girlfriend for our meeting. The agent kept giving me curious looks, being covered head to toe in dirt and mud, but by 5:00 we were pre-approved and the house was ours!


Epilogue: My girlfriend and I went out to dinner to celebrate our recent purchase, where I texted my college roommate with the exciting news. He texted me back, "That's Awesome! I just bought an engagement ring today, I am going to propose!" This text was a complete shock, and since I had been dating my girlfriend for over five years, I knew there would be big fallout if they got engaged and we had not, especially after buying a house.

Stay tuned for our next adventure in "And Now I'm Completely Broke"

We Are Getting A House! Part 1

As the first post on my thread I will start at the beginning and slowly give a retrospective of the past few months since we moved in. Bear with the early stories, they may be boring but I BOUGHT A FREAKING HOUSE and this is exciting for a twenty-something kid. The most expensive thing I had bought up until now was a cheap computer that I still had to finance in order to make payments.

So a few years ago I moved into the city to experience all that the urban life had to offer. Being a suburbanite my entire life I was equal parts anxious and apprehensive. Immediately I fell in love with the lifestyle and the short commute to work and school. Side Note: Over the course of these few years my better half bumped around from apartment to apartment with a few friends trying to find a happy medium between work and school for her commute. We had yet to live together at this point.

I began working part time as a property manager for a foreclosure real estate agent (so now let's add that up, 40+ hours at my full time job, 9 hours of class, 5-10 hours of homework, and now another 10-20 hours of property management... I must have hated life).

Pretty much this.

About a year in to working as a property manager, I was shown a townhouse right up the block from where I currently lived that had gone into foreclosure.

So I brought the girlfriend by to check out the house, she was apprehensive but said if we could get it for a reasonable price then we should. It is in a good part of Baltimore with virtually no crime and it had always been my dream to work on my own house. A big issue for me was parking, I drive a pick-up truck and approximately 99.999% of the city does not lend itself to parking a vehicle closer than 563 blocks (approx.) from your house. So since this house was in that 0.001% area that had parking in the immediate vicinity, I was interested.

I looked into the price, but it was out of our price range... over twice our price range at 236k (we are poor college kids, that is a ton of money to us!) So we put it out of our mind and moved on with our lives, working and studying. A few months went by and the price dropped, it went down to 216k, and then again to 147k... but still more than we can afford. So once again we went on with our lives, working, studying, working...

Please wait for the Thrilling Conclusion in "We Are Buying A House! Part Two"