It's Time

I've put it off for too long. It's been 3 years since I graduated college, 2 and a half since I started working. And now, finally, I have decided to start looking for a house. A place to call my own.

Haven't worked out all the details yet, but basically my goal is to close on a place within 2-3 months from now. I think I'm shooting for a townhouse that's within 10 minutes of where I work.

I guess I've been feeling the push to become a homeowner for a while now, only I always procrastinated and tried to avoid the responsibility. When I first moved in with Brian at the townhouse in P-tine, my plan was to live here for 6 months to a year before looking for my own place. Obviously, that didn't happen.

All along though, I knew it was the next major step for me to take in my life. It's dumb, but for the past few years I avoided putting my savings in any long term investments, because I figured I would need as much cash on hand for a down payment as possible. Before I knew it, I'd piled up a pretty significant chunk of money in my checking account that was just sitting there, unused and earning no interest.

It wasn't until I did my taxes last week that I forced myself to think more seriously about where I am in life, financially, career wise, and perhaps more importantly, maturity wise. I'm one of those people who takes forever when it comes to making big decisions. It's not that I fear responsibility, but sometimes I want to know exactly what I'm getting myself into, and what's going to happen, whether that's reasonable to expect or not.

In this case, I've waited long enough and it's become pretty clear to me that now is the time. I'm 25, my job seems pretty stable, and I think I've saved enough money for a decent down payment. So no more excuses.... time to find me a house.

*****

Unrelated note: After going through all the pictures I saved on my computer throughout this past season, and a few I took of my own, I decided to make a little slideshow of them to remember this team by. I've already emailed it out to some of you out there, a privileged few who I thought might like it, but it is a big file (10 MB) and some of your email addresses have bounced back with errors. Also I tried to avoid sending to anybody's work email address. So if any of you guys didn't receive my original message, but are still interested to see my little project, let me know and I'll figure out another way to get it to you (Illini fans only). It's nothing spectacular, but I thought people who followed this team might enjoy watching it as I enjoyed making it.