Woohoo, I made an offer on a house today! We should know by tomorrow whether or not the sellers will accept it. If they don't, we'll probably accept their counter-offer. I'm pretty excited. :)

Anyway, let's do some simple math, and see how badly lending institutions are raping everyone: Take an $85,000 home, a 30 year mortgage, 6.89% interest, and $657/mo payments. That comes to $236,520 over the course of 30 years. Damn near a quarter-mil...ouch.