What to Offer?

We are putting an offer on a house today!

We have been looking at homes for the last few months and have finally found one we both really like and would like to buy! It's a forclosed ranch-style home on 4.5 acres. It's in a nice neighborhood, only about 10 minutes from my in-laws (Mom-in-law is babysitter during the week so we needed to stay close to her). Since it was a forclosure, we went over the house quite a few times, just looking around, peeking in the windows, but yesterday we finally got our realtor over there with us so we could actually step inside and look around. It's the perfect size for us and doesn't need a whole lot of work to actually be able to live in it (unlike some of the other forclosures we've seen). It's a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, with a basement that was finished, but all the drywall had to be torn out due to mold (which is something we would look into further if we get the house).

It's a great deal BUT there are 3 other offers on it already. The bank is taking offers up until today, so hopefully, ours will be the last one in before the cut-off time.
I really don't want to get my hopes up but it's hard not to. What is hard is figuring out how much to offer when you know others have put in offers as well. You don't want to lose it because you underbid, but you don't want to offer WAY more than everyone else and lose out on a good deal. We talked to our realtor and my father-in-law, and have come up with a figure we think is good (hopefully, the best because that's what the bank's looking for).

Why do they make this so stressful?? I was hoping no one else had seen the house on the list and we would be the only ones interested, but it doesn't look like that's how it's going to happen.

So, pray for us this week as we figure it all out. I know that God has awesome things in store for us, and if this is the house for us, He will allow us to get it. If not, we'll keep looking.

(I obviously would love to post pics of the house but will wait until we know it's ours before doing so).