[NavyNJ]

As most here have said, it's very dependent on your personal situation, your financial "personality" and your longer term financial goals, but in our case, as with some others here, we decided to take out a mortgage initially in order to get into the house we found and liked before it was gone last Nov. Now, can everyone do that? No. In our case the financials worked out.

I will also add that contrary to what some may have experienced, or perceived, we were never in any way "urged" or "driven" or even "nudged" in one direction or another when it came to selecting a mortgage company. Yes, we were provided with all the options and benefits of using Citizens First Mortgage (different entity, btw, from Citizens First Bank - connected, but not the same), but we we also encouraged to check the market if we liked. Being able to close by our target date was also important, so that was a factor that we compared other companies against.

In the end, we chose Citizens First Mortgage and had a smooth, uneventful closing, on time. The one other feature of the Citizens First Mortgage product, when we compared to others, was the ability to "modify" the loan in the future without needing to go thru the hassle and cost of refinancing. This played into our plans to apply the bulk of our home sale proceeds up North to our mortgage in TV to reduce our payments. We're able to do this easily thru the Loan Modification feature, keeping everything about our loan the same, except the principle and amortization schedule without having to go thru a complete re-fi with closing costs, etc. Hope that adds to your decision making process.....Best of luck, whichever way you go!!