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If you're going to need the money in two years or so, you should not have it anywhere more risky than cash in a savings account. You could buy CDs with it but those are paying out so poorly these days that the lack of liquidity isn't worth it. Also, make sure you're aware of the tax implications of any gain you made on the sale of your house.
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Mar 5, 2015 19:25
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TheWevel posted:This is more of a home selling question: 1) Check with your CPA/Finance person to see what the tax consequences of the sale are, if any, before you hide the money under your mattress. 2) They will have some good ideas of what you can do with the money, and should be able to tell you without charging you anything. You can get 3 year CDs at 1+% APY - earn yourself an upgrade to one of your appliances while you wait to buy the next house.
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Mar 5, 2015 19:36
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sadus posted:Adjusting for inflation its about to where it leveled off from 2001-2007. Without inflation though I moved to Denver in 1999. My then-wife started her master's degree so we couldn't really afford to buy. We divorced in 04 and I bought my own place in 2006. Look at how stupid I am. I remember watching prices skyrocket from 2000 to 2004 and being really frustrated that we didn't buy when we first moved here. We had some friends who moved here in 98 and moved away in 99, and they profited something like $40k on their house in just one year.
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Mar 5, 2015 21:07
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blarzgh posted:1) Check with your CPA/Finance person to see what the tax consequences of the sale are, if any, before you hide the money under your mattress.
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Mar 5, 2015 23:15
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The home I was looking at buying just went from being for sale to foreclosed and is up for auction. How does this change things and what should I expect? It was listed at around 440,000 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/58-Highland-Mist-Cir-Hinckley-OH-44233/34886889_zpid/
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Mar 6, 2015 01:57
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Rakins posted:The home I was looking at buying just went from being for sale to foreclosed and is up for auction. How does this change things and what should I expect?
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Mar 6, 2015 02:01
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moana posted:You're not buying that house is how that changes things. Do you know the auction date? Expect to compete with all-cash offers, no inspections or contingencies. Unless you're willing to wait a long while to be possibly outbid by cash, I'd wave goodbye and keep looking. Auction starts on March 14th and ends on the 18th, that's a real a shame was really liking the place. The realtor is going to call me in an hour, anything I should I ask? Rakins fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 02:09
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Rakins posted:Auction starts on March 14th and ends on the 18th, that's a real a shame was really liking the place. The realtor is going to call me in an hour, anything I should I ask? If they couldn't swing a short sale there may be some other funny business going on, too.
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Mar 6, 2015 06:47
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I've been apartment hunting recently, and trying to find a decent 1BR under $700/mo. is pretty tough in the city where I live. However, a smallish 2BR / 3BR house here could be had for under $100k, and Zillow tells me that mortgage / property tax / etc. for one of those would run me $600/mo. or less. Am I completely mad for thinking about buying a house, or could it actually work out in my favor?
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Mar 8, 2015 07:21
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triple clutcher posted:Am I completely mad for thinking about buying a house, or could it actually work out in my favor? You are probably crazy. Assume transaction fees of ~10% for buying and then selling, and check the HOA or co-op fees.
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Mar 8, 2015 07:26
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triple clutcher posted:Am I completely mad for thinking about buying a house, or could it actually work out in my favor? Depends on your answers to: Do you enough for a down payment? Do you have money left over after down payment? How much will utilities cost vs. apartment? How long do you expect to live there? Are you prepared to pay for and/or fix poo poo yourself when it eventually breaks? Do you really want to buy a house? Are you sure? The list can go on. Unless your answers are "yes; yes; more but I'm prepared to pay; at least 5 years but probably forever; yes; yes; yes stop asking" then you probably shouldn't be considering a house. Question on process for my house buying: Is it normal to have two credit checks when getting a mortgage? The first was back in January when I was getting pre-approved and now that I'm about three weeks from closing I just saw they ran a second one. I assume this to ensure I'm not getting truck equity while getting a mortgage?
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Mar 8, 2015 14:24
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Higgy posted:Depends on your answers to: Yeah, it's to make sure you haven't splurged on something or magically decided to stop paying all of your other expenses to afford a brand new mortgage. This is also why the rule of thumb is to not do anything new until every step is done. They will question everything all over again.
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Mar 8, 2015 15:27
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balancedbias posted:Yeah, it's to make sure you haven't splurged on something or magically decided to stop paying all of your other expenses to afford a brand new mortgage. This is also why the rule of thumb is to not do anything new until every step is done. They will question everything all over again. I figured as much, it was just a little weird getting those notifications from Credit Karma. The only real change is my student loan finally sitting at a $0 balance. Car loan was paid off too but it's not reflected by the reporting agencies yet. Still waiting for that call saying to wire $5-figures to the escrow company and signing those closing papers. 
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Mar 8, 2015 16:01
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Work is sending me to Japan for a week, returning the day before I close. I have clearance to close, everything is set up contract wise through my lawyer, and I don't think there's anything left to do until closing. How hosed am I?
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Mar 8, 2015 17:59
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baquerd posted:Work is sending me to Japan for a week, returning the day before I close. I have clearance to close, everything is set up contract wise through my lawyer, and I don't think there's anything left to do until closing. How hosed am I? Not at all, even if something crazy happens and you get stuck in Japan you probably have a no questions asked ability to delay closing in your sales contract for 10 or 14 days, and you can always close remotely via limited power of attorney if truly necessary.
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Mar 8, 2015 18:08
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BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:Not at all, even if something crazy happens and you get stuck in Japan you probably have a no questions asked ability to delay closing in your sales contract for 10 or 14 days, and you can always close remotely via limited power of attorney if truly necessary. Check with your loan officer ahead of your trip to verify the lenders power of attorney requirements though if you think this might be an issue , some only allow you to appoint another borrower as your PoA so if you're qualifying solo you might not be able to do that. Out of country signing may also be an option, but again check with the lender and settlement agent - my old bank allowed it, but required that you have your docs notarized by the appropriate consulate official at the nearest American embassy.
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Mar 8, 2015 19:24
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Thanks, I'm reaching out to them to check if my wife can sign for me in the worst case. We've got movers, internet/TV installs, etc. scheduled already for the first couple of days after the closing...
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Mar 8, 2015 20:59
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Are there any general home improvement/maintenance/upkeep threads for those of us who have already completed the home buying process? I found a few highly specific threads in Hobbies & DIY where people are documenting their own personal Groverhaus re-enactment, but nothing geared to more general discussion.
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Mar 9, 2015 02:54
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Between the plumbing, wiring, and fix-it-fast threads in DIY, there's a lot of expertise and helpful people on a bunch of topics. You're welcome to post about it in this thread - upkeep is one of the things that is easy to underestimate when you're making a house buying decision, so the more potential house buyers who see other people's misery in real time, the better, in my opinion. Or feel free to start a new thread in BFC, although we're more about the finances than the trades skills so you might consider a DIY thread too. But those existing DIY threads will be your best bet for a lot of things if you have specific issues.
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Mar 9, 2015 03:06
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I am looking at making an offer on a townhouse in the next week or so. How much do I have to spell out in the offer? Can I just toss out a number or do I have to list what I would want changed and repaired for that number?
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Mar 9, 2015 13:57
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Sound_man posted:I am looking at making an offer on a townhouse in the next week or so. How much do I have to spell out in the offer? Can I just toss out a number or do I have to list what I would want changed and repaired for that number? First, you should get a real estate agent.
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Mar 9, 2015 14:27
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blarzgh posted:First, you should get a real estate agent. Or an attorney, if you have a legal plan at work. Just depends on what you're trying to do. If your legal plan covers all that, then you can put in an offer and try to get another 2% off or so since there will be no Buyer agent fee. But yeah, if it's your first rodeo, just get a realtor.
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Mar 9, 2015 15:14
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Sound_man posted:I am looking at making an offer on a townhouse in the next week or so. How much do I have to spell out in the offer? Can I just toss out a number or do I have to list what I would want changed and repaired for that number? If you really want to go it alone, you certainly can. I'd start by pulling the local MULTI-BOARD RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE CONTRACT 6.0 (or local equivalent?) contract from the website of a local group of Realtors. Then, go run to a lawyer and let them know what you're planning to do and whether they want to adjust the contract before you offer it. You can probably pay per-hour on this, or you may be able to hire them for a flat rate through to the closing (but in that case, make sure you've hired them until you close on some house, not a particular house). Once you have an accepted offer, it's time to go back to that lawyer and hire them for closing. If your offer doesn't work out, you at least have a good template for making the offers. You're going to have lots of difficulties getting into places without an agent though.
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Mar 9, 2015 16:57
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On the theme of home ownership misery I'll share a recent tale: I live in beautiful, safe, not-at-all-like-The-Wire Baltimore and get to enjoy the mid-atlantic's climate. For those not familiar, this leads to summers with highs up to 110F and winters with a couple of decent snowfalls, and lows around 15F. Consequently both A/C and heating really make a big difference in comfort levels, moreso because my house is marginally well insulated with a south facing roof that accumulates heat well and leads to ~15 degree differences between floors of my home. As the old chestnut goes, though, it's not the heat, it's the humidity. Living on the bay the humidity level rarely drops below 50%. You can survive without it, but it's really unpleasant, and I work from home. The home is heated off a natural gas utility, and the A/C runs off the primary electric supply. Last spring my A/C condenser died outright. I had an old circa 1980 system, and HVAC systems are generally rated to a useful life of 25 years, so I'd gotten more than the useful life out of the present system. The A/C unit had gotten quite weak before, the furnace worked well but was an old 1980's era 80% efficient system, and the primary HVAC unit had started leaking a non-trivial amount of water condensate into my basement, so I opted for replacing the whole thing outright with higher efficiency versions. All told a new system ran about $9500 bux installed. I was able to collect $600 in rebates from the power company. I was fortunate to have the cash on hand and paid for it out of pocket, and I replaced with a 14 SEER A/C condenser and a 95% efficient furnace. My cooling bill in the summer is roughly 2/3rds what I was paying before, and heating has also dropped to about 85% of the previous bills. I'd estimate that I'm saving maybe $360 a year total in HVAC expenses, which puts the payoff time for the furnace at the going rates at about 26.3 years. If I financed the replacement unit, or couldn't upgrade on efficiency, I couldn't even get a payoff near the lifetime of the unit, but I'd still have had a significantly less comfortable house to live in with no A/C unit, and if the furnace had gone in the winter, could have ended up with a snowballing expensive failure as pipes froze and burst. And that's just one part of a complicated house.
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Mar 9, 2015 17:03
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Dwight Eisenhower posted:HVAC systems are generally rated to a useful life of 25 years, so I'd gotten more than the useful life out of the present system. Usually with the exception of some very high-end geothermal systems, the life expectancy of a furnace is ~15-20 years and an AC condenser of ~10-15 years. They do last a really long time on their last legs but in many cases its almost like burning money compared to a newer system.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:15
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My master bedroom is in the corner of the house, and we have always noticed that it is the coldest room in winter and the warmest in the summer. We attributed this to the facing, sun exposure, and that we tend to keep the door closed for cat reasons. A week or two ago I noticed some drips of water dangling from the ceiling in the corner of the room. Woah! It hadn't rained for a week, but maybe there's a leak in the roof? It dried up in hours and hasn't come back, so I delayed climbing up into the attic space until yesterday due to being very busy. What I found... well. My roof is gently peaked, as typical for California, and the peak is at its lowest along that edge of the house, e.g, its a very narrow angle. There is also a soffit vent right there. The attic is unfinished, with old blown-in insulation between open joists. It's hot and dark and it really sucks to be up there, there's roofing nails sticking down through the roof, there's a lot of dust, and you have to crawl very carefully on boards laid across the joists to avoid falling through the ceiling. Way over there in the corner, I found the soffit vent... and for at least five feet either side, absolutely no insulation at all. None. The fuckers who blew in the insulation I guess just decided that corner was too hard to get to, so gently caress it? The soffit vent needed to have no insulation around it just to let air into the attic space, so I guess maybe they avoided clogging that up, but that's only like two feet wide. There's like five or six feet past the vent before you get to the corner, and there's no insulation there either. So water was condensing on the drywall ceiling because of the cold air coming in through the vent vs. the warm, more moist air inside my bedroom. And my bedroom is always too hot/too cold because it's got little or no insulation along a third of its ceiling. And we never noticed this before because the last joist blocks the view of that part of the attic space unless you crawl right the way over there. My house was built in 1958. I don't think this is the original insulation (and it's definitely not the original roof), so my best guess is that some time approximately thirty years ago, a previous owner replaced the roof and the old (or nonexistent) insulation, but did so in a super lazy loving way and I've been bleeding money through my bedroom ceiling for the last five years. 
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Mar 9, 2015 18:35
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blarzgh posted:First, you should get a real estate agent. I've got one, and generally I like him well enough and he seems to have all the answers. But it's also my first time buying and I want to get some outside info as well. When someone gets paid a percentage of what I spend its hard for me to put full faith in their help for negotiating a better price.
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Mar 9, 2015 19:36
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dietcokefiend posted:Usually with the exception of some very high-end geothermal systems, the life expectancy of a furnace is ~15-20 years and an AC condenser of ~10-15 years. They do last a really long time on their last legs but in many cases its almost like burning money compared to a newer system. Ask me about spending ever increasing amounts on whatever the old kind of refrigerant is every couple of years, I expect it to be over $300 next time. A new unit is going to be 3-4k (our furnace is fine), so I'm planning to keep destroying the planet until something else (compressor etc) breaks or the leak gets worse as right now the payback isn't there.
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Mar 9, 2015 19:37
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Half the attic (of course the half you couldn't see from the tiny access port) of my previous 2005 built 2 story home had no insulation either. It's like they rolled in enough to cover any area the inspectors could see and left. It was very confined up there and there was no way to even see it unless you crawled over past the furnace and ducting. I only found out when I was having a whole house fan installed since that guy HAD to crawl over there to scope out the location for the fan. He yells down from the attic "DUDE, yer not gonna believe this but.........."    The sad part was after getting it taken care of (the builder covered it under warranty) my cooling bills didn't drop at all. 
Keyser_Soze fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 19:57
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Sound_man posted:I've got one, and generally I like him well enough and he seems to have all the answers. But it's also my first time buying and I want to get some outside info as well. When someone gets paid a percentage of what I spend its hard for me to put full faith in their help for negotiating a better price. My take is that the agent has a wealth of information you probably won't acquire in your short time in the market. They can tell you what offer is likely to win the house, and what offer is likely to get laughed at. But keep in mind they are not motivated to get you the best deal, the sooner you buy the better for them. So lean on them, ask them questions, but be firm about what you're comfortable offering.
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Mar 9, 2015 20:36
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Sound_man posted:I've got one, and generally I like him well enough and he seems to have all the answers. But it's also my first time buying and I want to get some outside info as well. When someone gets paid a percentage of what I spend its hard for me to put full faith in their help for negotiating a better price. Agents' primary motivation is usually closing fast, not necessarily getting the price as high as possible. Their 3% is only $150.00 for every $5k more of purchase price, so they'd generally rather make the sale and get their whole commission than risk losing it trying to nickle and dime the price up. Ask your agent, because I think markets tend to vary on whether its proper to include repairs in the initial offer, or make the initial offer and then negotiate repairs/closing costs till you meet in the middle. In a hot market, the seller probably isn't going to dick around with someone who's asking about $250 for sink replacement, when someone else offered $2.5K/close in 2 days, ten minutes ago. On a house thats been sitting there a month, or where the sellers are already under contract on another place, they may be desperate enough that they'll paint the Sistine Chapel mural over the bathtub for you. Edit: and do what he said/\ /\ /\
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Mar 9, 2015 23:34
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So they raised my rent up to 2.1k a month for a 550sqft 1br. (trash, water is another 100). There's nothing cheaper for miles around unless you include 300sqft studios or rooming with 3 people. Now I'm looking to buy a condo/townhouse. Been searching for 2 months. I see 700-800sqft ones go for around 400k-500k plus a 400 HOA. So about 2.4-2.8k monthly and a 100k downpayment. Is it at all reasonable to nab one of these 400k places? I mean at this price, closing costs are a fraction of their worth Oh yeah, i forgot to mention the average house here bids 10-20% above asking price and all sell AS-IS. So it'll really be a 500k place after bids and repairs.
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Mar 10, 2015 03:00
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MeruFM posted:I mean at this price, closing costs are a fraction of their worth
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Mar 10, 2015 03:51
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We are housesitting right now in Santa Cruz, lease is up April 15th. I am selling my house in San Diego sometime soon (hopefully within a month or two) for 500-550k. There is a FSBO house that we were considering buying for 400k, the dude just texted us that if we wanted to rent it to check it out it would be 2000/mo. Not sure if we should just put in an offer for it. We're not in love with the property but it's a good location a bit closer to Santa Cruz proper and would be easy to rent out if we ended up not liking it. There are a half dozen other houses we're interested in but haven't looked at yet because we stupidly had a vacation planned for 10 days in the middle of all this. It's dumb to put in an offer on the place we don't really super love, huh? Like, I'm imagining I buy this 400k house, then sell my house, then find another house I REALLY like and buy that house too and rent out the other one. But I think the 400k house is one the best we can do in this area, it's a pretty darn good deal and every other house in that price range is being snapped up right now (I think the FSBO thing really works against him, we found him on Craiglist for god's sake). As you can see, I'm talking myself in and out of either renting this house from the dude or straight up offering to buy it because I think he's undervaluing the property. I don't know if anyone has any advice or maybe just some xanax
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Mar 10, 2015 04:49
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I'm a fan of renting in an area before buying, so why not rent the place and check it out?
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Mar 10, 2015 06:12
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We've been renting here already for 6 months and like it, but yeah, you're probably right. We emailed him asking if we could rent starting beginning of April. I just want to be done with moving around  I like having a place to nest. Watch, now we find a house and get an offer accepted before we even move into the rental house. JUST YOU WATCH
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Mar 10, 2015 07:22
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gvibes posted:Keep in mind that many closing costs scale with price, e.g., realtor commissions, transfer stamps, etc. Yeah you're right. I didn't really consider the costs when I sell it. Just kinda sick and tired of living in an apartment with no kitchen ventilation and the only windows face the walkway so either blinds 100% or mark yourself as a exhibitionist.
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Mar 10, 2015 09:24
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is there ever a situation where renting-to-own a house is a good thing? Seems like a way to be scammed and / or waste a lot of money.
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Mar 10, 2015 14:32
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triple clutcher posted:is there ever a situation where renting-to-own a house is a good thing? Seems like a way to be scammed and / or waste a lot of money.
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Mar 10, 2015 15:43
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MeruFM posted:Yeah you're right. I didn't really consider the costs when I sell it. So move! Unless you live in an extremely small town odds are good that you can find a better apartment to rent or even a house to rent. Being tired of your current apartment is a good reason to move, but it's not a good reason to buy
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Mar 10, 2015 17:25
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