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Before you can finally buy the house, you need to get insurance and a lawyer or title agency to handle the closing.  Once again, the best advice I can give for this is to ask friends and family who they have used in the past. 

My parents have their homeowners’ insurance through Travelers, the same company where they have their auto insurance.  Because they have both of them through the same company, they get a pretty big discount.  I decided to try this out for lack of other suggestions, and it worked out in my favor.  I found out that Travelers auto insurance was much cheaper than my Progressive insurance was…  $200 cheaper to be exact.  That was a lot of money saved, and I found out the homeowners insurance rate was very good as well.  Also my insurance agent was very helpful… she worked directly with the realtor and mortgage agency to get the information she needed.  I didn’t know what kind of coverage I wanted or needed, so she went with average amounts for everything.  This saved me a lot of research.  More importantly, I knew I could trust the agent’s judgement because of my previous experiences with her. 

On a side note, you will have to pay the first year’s insurance along with your application.  Make sure you have the cash ready to do this.

For my closing I decided to go with a lawyer instead of a title agency.  I’ve never needed the services of a lawyer before so I didn’t have anyone in mind.  I went with someone who I had known personally since I was just a kid — his son and I went to grade school together.  He remembered me and promised to take good care of me… it was good to feel like I could trust him.  The lawyer prepares all the documents for closing, collects your down payment, then handles the title transfer for you.  This basically took all the work out of it for me… all I had to do was sign papers as they handed them to me. 

This part of the homebuying process was probably the easiest, but I guess that really came to my luck in selecting good people to work for me. 

From here it’s just a countdown to your closing date.  In the last part of this little epic, I’ll go through my experiences with that, so stay tuned for part 5.