NACA, and Getting a Home

-on Saturday my husband had a meeting with the gentle folks at NACA. what is NACA, you ask? it’s the “Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America.” they are a non-profit organization that helps people like my husband and i buy a home. you see, because of our credit past, if a bank even decided to consider us for a home loan, they would make sure our eternal souls were signed away on the contract too. NACA is a company that protests that kind of treatment by giving home loans at low interest rates. there are tons of specifics that i don’t understand that my husband is taking care of for me. i’m just trying to keep my eyes on the prize… supposedly, at the end of a long and grueling process of credit-counciling and paperwork filing, we’re going to have a home loan. with an interest rate of 4.625 with the option to buy down to .25. i know, right? i am pretty excited, because with NACA‘s low [fixed!] interest rates, my husband and i will be able to buy a much nicer home than what i had previously expected. you don’t have to have terrible credit or low income to get a NACA home loan, but they don’t count you out just because you do.

so, 4 years after making one of the worst mistakes of our lives (foreclosing on our home so we could build and move into an addition onto MIL’s house) we may be able to buy another home. looking back, the first home we bought was a mistake. we bought it spur of the moment. we didn’t research the town, we didn’t look closely at the neighborhood or the school system. it was a hundred year old fixer-upper with gorgeous woodwork and old-style keys, and the largest yard in the neighborhood. unfortunately, we just didn’t realize that it was too far from the “city” to be comfortable. it was too much work for us… tearing down horse-hair plaster, and constantly getting splinters from old, unfinished wood floors that you don’t have the time and patience to re-finish really sucks. i was a young mother, in a new town and my husband had a job very similar to the one he has now…on the road a lot. it was the wrong house, at the wrong time… and looking back on that, i think that whole crappy situation gave us the wisdom we desperately needed to happily settle in a house that we love. we aren’t going to rush this time. we aren’t going to make a decision on a home until we’ve seen it completely naked and vulnerable under a microscope.

i am just happy that my husband found this organization so that we could have the opportunity to buy a home. when we moved in with MIL we thought we’d be there forever, so the foreclosure wouldn’t matter. obviously, it didn’t work with MIL, and i was resigned to renting until we could get a small, high-rate home loan from a local bank, and buy a tiny in-need-of-work home eventually. hopefully, this organization is the answer to our prayers and they will put us in a home that i can be proud of from the start. we’ll see, eh?