Home Restlessness
The hubby and I have been in our house for over 4 years now and I can definitely see why the average first-time home buyer stays in their first home about 5 years. I can run off an arm’s length list of things that bug me about my house. No one but me notices most of these things, but they sure do bother me. When we first moved in, we had all of these grand plans for home improvement but have we done most of them? Heck, no! We’ve gotten a few things done, like a shed, a fence and a dishwasher, but that’s only a fraction of my If Only I Had Lots of Time, Money and Patience List.
Every now and again, I’ll browse online at homes in the area and try to figure out where we should move to when we finally do decide to sell this home. The problem with this venture is that very few homes or neighborhoods are as centrally located as ours is. I just want a newer, bigger, better laid out house with more land. Oh, and it would help if the mortgage was equal to or less than our current mortgage. Haha. Ok. That last part is a total dream, but hey, while I’m dreaming, I might as well dream big, right?
While glancing at houses online this weekend, I found one about a mile up the road and just over in the newer section of our home development. It’s selling for about $164k more than our house could sell for right now. It’s got about 600-700 more square feet than this house with a full basement. It has a 2-car attached garage and a 2-car detached garage with electricity, water, cable and phone. It’s got twice as much land as ours and beautiful landscaping. The front yard is a little small but other than that, it looks like the perfect house.
With the higher taxes and estimated homeowners insurance, it would cost us about $800 more a month than our current mortgage. If you consider the extra we’re currently putting towards our mortgage monthly, it would really increase our payment about $500.
And this is the part where I talk myself out of this because I am not prepared to move.
- While the prices in our community are still experiencing very modest appreciation, homes are generally taking 3-6 months to sell.
- My neighbor just put her house on the market.
- It’s winter time, which is typically a bad time to sell a home.
- My husband and I decided recently that we were at least going to stay put until my step-daughter graduates high school.
- Capping off all of this is my desire to keep all of our expenses affordable on the lower of our two salaries (currently mine) and at this time, this home definitely would stretch me quite thin. The higher utilities might just push this one out of the range I could afford on my salary alone.
Eventually we’re going to buy another home, but I’ve got a plan in place for that. Currently, we have between 6-12 months of expenses in our emergency fund. I hope to boost this up pre-purchase to what 6-12 months of our expenses would be after this future home is finally purchased. In this case, my emergency fund would need another $5-10k. Then, I would feel comfortable buying a home that would stretch one of our salaries should one of us lose a job.
Yes, that will make me feel better.
Being unemployed for 8 months sure does influence one’s decision making for a long time to come, doesn’t it?
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January 14th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Would you consider taking most of your reserve to apply toward the down payment to bring the cost of the mortage and such to a closer level to where you are now and then rebulid your reserve?
Or, Since you will be waiting until your step daughter graduates, would you be able to save enough to offset the major difference between what you now pay and what you would pay?
Or, would you be able to pay more than you are currently toward what you owe on the house so that you have more when you sell it?
Just wondering where you stand on maintaining that reserve. I noticed that you increased your reserve from 8 months to 12 months. Will you continue to increase the available months you can go w/o a job, or are you going to do something else with the extra?
January 14th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
The problem is that putting the reserve as additional down payment on the house wouldn’t cut down the mortgage all that much, about $150 a month.
Houses around here are appreciating faster than I can save up. Granted, my house is appreciating, as well, just not as fast as the newer, higher-cost homes are.
We’re putting quite a bit extra towards the mortgage now, about $250/month, then maxing out our 401ks, throwing some money into a Roth IRA and then a little bit more into savings. I could probably squeeze more out for savings. I just need to be more diligent with our budgeting.
I think between general savings and salary increases over the next couple of years, we’ll be able to start looking again. I just have to be patient.
Patience is not one of my strongest virtues.