Hug and sympathies. If it's any comfort, now isn't a good time to buy anyway: the market is stupidly inflated, and set for a drop. The only reason msmemory and I bought our house this year was because we had one to sell at the same time, so we got the inflation both coming and going. And even there, I had a couple of nervous months wondering if the bottom was going to fall out before we managed to sell the old one. Bear in mind that we bought our old house the *last* time the market was like this, and got to watch its value plummet by about 25% in the first two years. Not fun.

(Obviously, I Am Not A Financial Advisor. But I've been spending a lot of time lately examining how this stuff really works...)