Milestones

My answer to Sera in the previous post's comments got a little long so I'm posting it here:

It really is a milestone, Sera. We both feel guilty for being so happy since it's due to Eli's father dying, but he would be thrilled that we're able to do this thanks to him. There's no telling if or when we'd be able to save enough on our own.

There are "first time buyer" concessions in Canada, but Eli has owned homes before so we don't qualify.

We did our first drive-bys today. We found that Abbotsford, which we thought would be okay, won't. The homes in our price range, while looking okay online, just really aren't good enough mostly due to location. BUT we did see two homes we both really liked in Mission that would be much better for Eli commute-wise (he can take the West Coast Express to work). We also saw a few more for sale that didn't come up in our MLS searches. We're going to see if they're in our price range. We're also going to look for Abbotsford townhomes.

There simply aren't any single family homes in our price range in the Greater Vancouver Area except in Abbotsford and Mission. So, tomorrow we're heading out to Maple Ridge to look at townhomes. Maple Ridge has lots of nice townhomes in our price range and would be great commute-wise (better than Abbotsford).

We haven't yet told my mum that this is going on. I'm not sure why I'm so reluctant to do so. Weird, eh?