Buying A House
debby -- Saturday, July 06, 2002 -- 07:20:35 AM(All users will see what tags exist for a thread. Please tag carefully!)
OK so while I was innocently enjoying myself at the beach last weekend the consort was doodling around online and found a house in Chicopee (a couple of hundred miles from anywhere I care to be) and hit the "apply for mortgage" link and much to the amazement of both of us, was approved. So now we're actually looking for a house somewhere around here where I do want to be. Am I toast? Or is it really as easy as clicking on a button on the internet and having a nice young man call us the next morning and tell us he is authorized to loan us 100's of thousands of dollars, and then clicking on another button on the internet a few days later and saying "We'd like this one please." I mean I had always assumed buying a house would be substantially more complicated than ordering some books from Amazon...
No, it's pretty easy. I was approved for $300K back when I had weaker credit and it was all done by email until I would have had to come in to sign.
What I'm scared of, as we ponder doing it, is buying a second house. You know, selling one and buying another all at once. That seems far more complicated.
But I wanna, because I am sick to death of this drive and being in the burbs.
Do you want to have two houses total? Is there any reason why you couldn't?
Debby, we went through almost the same process. I think the real impetus for me was hearing that a couple we know, who have a combined income of probably less than $40k, bought a house.
So we spoke to a couple of people and looked into pre-approved mortages and started looking for a house and after seeing 35 or so and bidding on 2 that we didn't get, we found what we think will be a great place.
(Go to Hou se.)
One thing we realised - if we had gone ahead and bought a house that was at the upper limit of our pre-approval, it would have been tight. The place we got was about 35k under the maximum and the combined mortgage/taxes/utilities will be pretty much the same as we're paying for rent right now.
I can't believe we don't close for another two freaking months. Aradiaseven from TT got a place last week and they close at the end of July. I mean, it's better for us because more time to pack, more time to get rid of crap, whatever, but it feels so far away.
Biscuit, that is a very cool house. I like all the brick and woodwork. I'll bet you're really excited!
We're having one built right now, and we won't move in until friggin NOVEMBER.
We had the problem of selling one and buying another. Last year, we made an offer on a house contingent on selling ours within 60 days. ours didn't sell, and we withdrew our offer and took our house off the mkt for the winter. Then around March, we put our house back on the market before we bought another house, and it sold in 4 days. We had been looking, but still took nearly two months to decide to build. So we had to move into an apartment in the interim, which we did. We also moved into an apartment that we thought we'd be in for at most 2 months, so it's kind of crappy.
So that's the kind of thing you can go through selling and buying at the same time.
Sadie, don't rent it unless you have to.
Biscuit, why is it taking two months to close? Ours took a few days over a month. And it would have closed on time if Candy at the mortgage company hadn't sat on our file for two weeks and then been gone on vacation for the third week.
Susanne, the vendor wanted a lot of time: he's retiring to Newfoundland, where he's from, and he's building a house/B&B on a piece of property there.
The long closing isn't that common - most of the places we looked at were asking for 60 days: ours was over 90.
Pebbles, yeah, we're pretty het up about it. There's an awful lot of pink that's got to go, and the basement needs a couple of drywall dividers knocked down, but other than that (and replacing the stove with a proper gas one) the place is good to go. There's also a huge sunroom/family-room thingy off the kitchen, with a gas fireplace.
Weird thing was, the market here is so tight - people are bidding 20k, 30k, sometimes 50k over asking - and yet we got this one for less than the listed price, even though one of our conditions was a satisfactory home inspection (lots of buyers are waiving the inspection condition, because competition for houses is so tight). We really did luck out.
Of course, let's see whether the furnace melts down this winter.
Pebbles, that's exactly what I fear.
We haven't started looking seriously yet. I mean, I drool over the listings, and last Sunday I thought I saw one of my favorite houses in town in the paper, and was all ready to go rush over. If we happened to see something that just looked too good to pass up, we'd probably make a contingent offer. Otherwise, our plan is to pay off a car (we have 2 that we owe on now, thanks to having crappy cars before and going a bit too extreme in the other direction). I think with at least one paid off, we could, if we had to, buy another without having this one sold. That makes the timing less critical.
I am hopefully getting a substantial raise soon, and we will no longer have full-time daycare as of August, all of which should help with the car payoff/downpayment savings. We make about twice what we did when we bought this house, even before my hoped-for raise, and at that time we could have been approved for twice the house we bought, which is about the amount of house we want now. So I'm pretty sure we could get approved to buy without selling this one. And then maybe refinance after selling this one, using our profit for the downpayment.
That said, my dream house, rather than a similar one, could go on the market tomorrow, and I'd change the whole plan.
>Yes, I know I could rent this one out, but it seems like a pain in the ass.
I really wish we had done this with our starter house, although I don't know how we would have come up with a down payment for this one. We sold just before the market upturned here. It's one of those things -- the market conditions meant we got into this house, which we love, for what we could afford to pay, but we had to take less for the old house than we had hoped. Five years later, we could be selling that house for a really substantial amount.
Yes, that's what I was thinking when I suggested "rent". If it can make any sort of income that will cover the mortgage, then it really makes sense to hold on to it. It does little harm, and is usually a good writeoff. But get a property manager so you don't have to worry about it.
Biscuit, are home warranties available up there? We got one when we bought our first house; it was something like $200 for the first year, and it covered the major appliances that came with the house, heating and cooling systems, and other stuff. For us, it paid off, because the central AC went out about eight months after we moved in, and all we had to pay for a new one was a $50 deductible. I'd be careful about who you buy it from, since it seems like it would be easy to get a shitty one that didn't cover the big stuff or one from a company that may or may not be around in a year.
Well I just set up a roll over IRA for the 401k from my previous company so I can pull the money out for a down payment. I can't add to the account as I am no longer with that employer and I can't roll it over to my new employer because the new one is 403b not 401k and I had already lost a couple of grand on it from the market skidding so I'll just use it for the down payment.