Buying A House: C or D?

god, i hope not

Wauw. Is this a pure investment, or are you like planning to move there or put your parents in it or something?

None of my business, just trying to figure out why someone who doesn't want to live in a house would want to buy one.

Me, I wouldn't have gone through any of the BS I went through to buy a house, were it not a place I intended to sleep in and keep guitars and beer in.

it's pure investment. the housing market in and around nashville is nuts; lots demand and finite supply. i had just been sitting on the money in the bank as i have little to no interest in investing in the stock market and with interest rates being what they are, I think i made $3 in interest last year. the return on this house figured up to 14% yearly. The house in question has a three year old roof, same for HVAC system, new kitchen, assessment suggested it was in excellent shape. If rental rates don't decline and if i don't have a major gap in tenancy, I'll make back my investment in less than seven years. And if they DO decline, I still have sufficient padding where I'm unlikely to need to pay more to cover the mortgage than what a renter would provide.

Again, i haven't physically been in the building yet; i'm putting a lot of trust in the people who are assessing the risk... but that's my mother and her best friend for the past forty years, who has worked in the housing market in that area for longer than that. I feel safe and I made sure to leave enough liquidity where I can cope in case of an immediate emergency.... that was part of the planning, to make sure not to start looking until i hit the arbitrary number that i could handle. Realistically, i coulda bought this place three years ago but i didn't want to zero out my checking. strangely enough, buying a house was amongst the least stressful elements of my life for the past two months!

Anyways, i don't plan to move in or put my parents in it. I'm hoping that around ten years from now it'll provide enough equity where I can sell it and make enough money to buy the home that i DO want to move into. I just plain don't have enough money to consider buying in the NYC area right now unless i'd like to become a fixer upper feller and it ain't me.

Coolio. Best of luck to you.

Thanks! I'm not crazy enough to pretend there's not SOME risk and who knows what the next decade in america will look like. But you gotta do something!

sounds like a clever plan.

on a side topic, and i don't mean this about hearing that kind of actual action, i am really tiring of every conversation or dinner party etc ending with a discussion of london property. i know it's a serious issue but it's starting to feel like discussing the weather, and there's no point to it or nothing achieved. it's depressing.

one last note: the bank has to run their own assessment of the property to determine if it's a good idea for them to loan you the money and that assessment sets the starting price for resale from the moment I buy. The bank's assessment came back 8k higher than what i'm paying. So I kinda just built 8k in equity this week! it's all magic with numbers until i decide to sell but it was a good sign.

14% sounds unrealistically high from what I know, but even if you do half that it's pretty good. Or maybe you really lucked out, IDK.

it IS a high return but market rental rate (as of today, who knows about tomorrow but rents have steadily increased in the area for 5+ years) is 150% of the cost of the mortgage! That kind of return is why i had been sniffing around looking for a house for over a year. I got outbid on other properties multiple times by people offering all cash up front and upwards of 10k over asking price! It certainly seems like there's a bubble going on there but my hope is that it'll maintain another decade. Given the influx of new businesses and population leap, anything within an hour's commute of downtown is ridiculously desirable.

I'm starting to wonder if I missed the boat on refi after having been in my house for 5 years. Anybody out there done one recently?

I might do that this year, I think it's still viable

We're at 3.75, and hell, might've could've gone even lower.

We're at 4.375% -- kind of had an unlucky upswing right when we bought. But it's also a co-op and mortgages for those are a little harder to come by and sometimes have higher rates. We almost went through with a refinance at I think 3.75% but I was changing jobs and my wife had to take leave from her job and it just got too messy so we didn't wind up doing it. Slight regret but given that we'll move probably in a couple more years anyway it's not a huge loss.

Not recently but I did it five years ago, and it was pretty painless. Definitely made a difference by improving the rate. I didn't take any cash out, just wanted a lower payment.

A decent bank will walk you through whether it's worth it for your particular situation - they put your information into a computer that spits out offers from different institutions. If you don't hear about anything that pays for itself in a year (that is, do you get a reduction that offsets the closing costs), then don't bother. But if you've made payments for 5 years you're probably in a good position in terms of credit score, equity, and appreciation. That ought to count for something.

xp seeing your current rate, yeah, getting that sucker down below 4% should totes be worth it.

anyone done it to get cash out for home improvements? need to reroof this sucker

my rate was pretty lousy (4.5%) but that's how investment property goes. The plan is to try to throw about 10k per year at the principal.

If you're going to do that, you may also wish to see whether a roofer will offer payment terms. You may still want to do the refi anyway, but doing the math can't hurt.

We just had the furnace die a few hours before the mega-blizzard; I didn't happen to have a spare $9,000 laying around, but was able to finance it through a third party - faster and ultimately preferable to dicking around with the mortgage.

yeah, I thought about a home equity or home improvement loan

This is a wild card, but I was able to take advantage of a hail storm that had passed through my zip code, like, 18 months earlier.

My neighbor was getting his roof redone. We had our little mailbox conversation about how the shingles are lookin' good, Mike, who's doing this for ya? Turns out, his insurance was paying for the whole thing because of that storm and I should look into it too.

I called my agent, and he was all, oh you heard about that too, eh? Here let me get you the paperwork.

I don't even remember the damn storm, but the roof looks nice.

(Mike's the name of my neighbor btw, mh.)

oh, don't worry, I always assume there are half a dozen people named Mike in the vicinity and none of them are me

still trying to sell a house in an "exciting" midwestern college town, been on the market since july & under contract since december but the buyer's bank keeps flaking on the closing date, so we're hoping again to close this friday. can't pay for this house much longer so if the closing falls through we're looking at america's favorite pastime, foreclosing. we're committed to expat life so the credit rating ruin doesn't really matter to us but it's still annoying since we could have just walked away in july and saved a bunch of money.

main lesson: don't buy a house in an "exciting" midwestern college town

also dealing with all this shit overseas is a hassle b/c you have to have various documents notarized and the french notaries want the documents translated into french naturally but the translations have to be by a certified translator which means $ or you can go to the us embassy to do it but the embassy also charges $ for notarization. basically there are all these lampreys who feed on house sales, relatively little bits here & there that add up to an annoying sum.

we had similar trying to remortgage from the US - just certifying that a photocopy of a document is a true copy is hilarious as the UK bank demands standard UK wording but US notaries can only use their standard wording which is different.
I'm finally free of that mortgage co though who gave me the middle name 'Lousie'

ugh, just got word that the closing is delayed another week, because of a missing child support letter. they've had three months to get this shit straight.

also apparently the main problem is that the buyer used an internet loan company which my realtor warned us about, saying that they always drag their heels and barely have their shit together, but we need to sell asap and it was our first offer.

only gonna buy in cool towns from now on

many thanks all, and especially puffin- very helpful indeed. (xposts)

it is very likely that we will buy a house either in the next year, we just don't know where yet due to a potential move/job change

in each of the likely locations though we have a friend who is a realtor and it seems to me to be common sense to rely on their help when we do decide to start looking for a house. but many smart family members are telling us that it is not a good idea to do this -- they've all seen relationships burned by hiring friends as realtors. this bums me out especially since one of our realtor friends is a very close friend of mine who i've known since high school and i imagine it would feel very weird to move to this place without using his help, especially since he will be one of the first people i call up to hang out if we move there.

what do you all think? have you hired friends as realtors and has it worked out?

it is very likely that we will buy a house either in the next year

i think it's worth getting an outside view of how successful your friends are as realtors. talk to people who have worked with them.

i used a family friend as a realtor and it worked out fine but she was quite good at her job!

My real estate agents have eventually become like family.

like family members you like, or ones you secretly loathe?

Hmm mmm.

Can you choose between closing the deal and losing that person as a friend? If so...

Completely serious about this.

my sewer line backed up. I really should just have it cleaned or checked out every couple years, since it's been intrusive tree roots in there both times. but, it's been five years, sooo... no big deal, other than the fact I need to mop up in the unfinished basement

my coworker who bought a big ol' suburban mcmansion for his large family just got his tax assessment and the county now thinks it's worth $50k more than it was previously, which is actually more than he bought it for. whoops!

he spent a half hour on the phone with a chatty county assessor who had some good courses of action. i told him just to write NO across it in red crayon and mail it back.

this is crazy http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1842-Cadwell-Ave-Cleveland-Heights-OH-44118/33656241_zpid/

housing is cheap in cleveland but im kind of astonished that this house is that low

Cool. Used to watch shows like Cosby Show and Family Ties and wonder if there were really houses out there that had a second staircase to the kitchen.

you could probably find a comparable house in my city for that much a few years back, not so sure about now. the neighborhood that has a lot of circa-1900 large homes has definitely had some turnover and prices went up

I remember when looking for homes five years back there was a house that had only one staircase to the second story, it was off the kitchen, and it had enough turns to basically be a spiral staircase

have fun getting any furniture up that one

that place is right down the block from the grog shop, basically the only place I know in Cleveland thanks to reading bands' tour itineraries over the years

Could use some fresh paint, but http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1422-S-Summit-St_Little-Rock_AR_72202_M73236-65661#photo0

grog shop is a good venue

beautiful xp

http://www.iowarealty.com/aspx/FindAHome/listingdetail.aspx?list_numb=504681

here you go, $155k, come join my neighborhood

haha, the hell is this?

http://i.imgur.com/uFKVpnY.jpg

http://www.iowarealty.com/userdocs/homeimages/504681/504681_10.jpg

please tell me i get to keep the toy atv

pretty sweet house tbh

... and don't say it's for congregatin'

http://i.imgur.com/BrzBwX7.png

I think on the realtor page it says they had bands play in the backyard, lol

oh, no central air, that's why it's cheap

boooo