Buying a house… round two

Steve and I have been together for 10 years… we rented a house and an apartment in college… we lived in my parents’ basement… we lived in a one-bedroom apartment when Ryan was born and then rented Steve’s grandpa’s house… you could say we got around.

Finally we were able to buy our first home when Steve landed a great engineering job just south of here. He commuted for awhile, but it was far, so we bought a house and moved down there.

big backyard

After just a year of living there, he got a better job offer at a company back home, where we’re both from. It couldn’t have been more perfect… no one wants to pack up and sell a house after only a year and buy a new one, especially in this housing market. But we couldn’t pass on this opportunity… and we got lucky: someone had been eyeing our house down south and we sold it within a week of being on the market and then we found the perfect house here and our offer was accepted immediately. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, haha… knock on wood!

snowy backyard

Anyway, from buying two houses within a year I’d say I have some tips… the second time definitely went a lot smoother because we were a bit more experienced. It’s hard the first time! I’m working with LifeLock on sharing these tips to stay SAFE while buying a new house:

  • Before you invite movers into your home, check our their online reviews and look them up at the Better Business Bureau
  • There are generally a lot of purchseas made around buying a new house. Unauthorized purchases or suspicious activity on your accounts may be harder to catch so keep an eye on them!
  • Beware of any emails asking for personal information related to the purchase of your new home. Banks, the IRS, etc. will not conduct business like this over email!
  • Keep your important personal documents in a safe while you’re moving. When we moved, we made sure to move them ourselves, instead of having the movers take them in their truck.
  • Set up mail forwarding! When we moved to our new house the previous owners apparently forgot this step and for weeks we were getting their mail–even important bank and tax documents and packages!
  • Replace the locks on your new home immediately–you never know who has a spare key out there. Don’t forget changing the code on the garage keypad, if there is one! We forgot about that and I panicked in the middle of the night when I thought I heard the garage opening! (It wasn’t, I was just paranoid, lol).
  • Check out the neighborhood before you buy–is it safe? What are the crime rates? Well lit? Families nearby? Come back at night and on the weekend to see it.

moving truck

Don’t forget to take photos of the event… it’s an occasion to be celebrated! Congrats on your new home! 🙂 And thank you to LifeLock for sharing tips with us on how to stay safe. They help protect against identity theft 24/7! It was pretty cool to get the alerts from LifeLock when the bank was checking into our accounts and running credit checks while we were getting our loan approved for the new home… we knew exactly when the bank was working on it! And we felt safe and secure with LifeLock watching our backs.

The LifeLock Facebook Page (don’t forget to enter their LifeLock for Life Sweepstakes each week!), Twitter stream, and G+ profile are full of updates and tips so make sure to check them out!

~disclosure: as a LifeLock Ambassador, I received a membership and compensation for this post.

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