The Bernsteins are buying a house! I'll blog more about this later (probably not until after the closing), but for now I'll just say that the house meets our needs, at a price within our budget.

For now, I'm focused on trying to get the mortgage rate. I have a mortgage broker my realtor recommends, who seems pretty good, but I don't want to rely solely on what he finds for me. Despite the thousands of articles written for prospective homebuyers, I haven't found any that give good advice on how to get the best mortgage deal, beyond "shop around" and "try to negotiate." This is a rather large transaction for us, so if anyone has some good tips for getting the best mortgage rate, please leave a comment or email me. (And I'll share one tip myself--the Navy Federal Credit Union is currently running a special in which it's giving the same, low rates for jumbo as for conforming mortgages). Unfortunately, we're not members.