Seeing as moving and buying a new house is a huge expense, I thought I should breakdown some of the numbers so people know what we're working with. I mentioned that we now have a mortgage of about $215,000. The house actually cost a bit more than that. First, we were able to negotiate the price wayyyy down. The former owners were a retired couple who sold the house themselves. It had been on the market for almost a year and I think they just wanted to get rid of it. They had dropped the price a few times and then we negotiated it down even more. Second, the market was realllly hot when we were moving. To get an idea, we listed our townhouse on a Thursday, had our first showing/open house on a Sunday and got 3 offers that night. We bought our townhouse as a foreclosure when the market was at it's worst, so we made a huge profit. I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars. That townhouse ended up being a very smart investment! Thirdly, right before we bought the house my husband was finally able to collect on the profit of the business he co-owns. We have been living on a very small salary (less than the national average), so he was able to take a lot of profit. We decided the best thing was to put (most) of it towards the down payment because then we could get a better interest rate on the loan. So with all of that, we only had to take out a small mortgage. The house is a fixer-upper, but not to the point where everything has to be done right away. It's mostly just ugly bathroom tiling, yucky carpeting on the stairs, outdated light fixtures, etc. All things we can live with for a while. And I'm not worried about pumping too much money into the house over the years because there are houses down the street that are $900,000-$1.2 million. No joke, our house is the eyesore on the street, hence why we got it so much cheaper. This is getting long, so I just wanted to quickly say that moving didn't cost that much because we actually moved to the next town over and had over 2 weeks before we had to get out of our townhouse. This allowed us to move a lot of stuff ourselves. We did hire movers for the really big stuff (my husband has a bad back). But we went with a fledgling company that was super cheap. So we were able to pay for all of this in cash and just budget it into our regular monthly expense.