If you have kids and someone wants to give advice - who's advice do you trust more? The mom with 7 kids or the 19-something aged nanny?
Same in real estate! I have a friend who is going through real estate school who is never owned a house. How can an agent share in the excitement and stress of finding the perfect home if they've never actually experienced it?
I want to share our home journey with you, share our experiences.
Part #1
We got married! Yay. We moved into a little 2 bedroom condo in Orem that was part of a 4-plex. It was adorable and I still love it. We actually only lived there for 4 months though.
See, home ownership was always a part of the plan. We talked to a mortgage lender to start the process. We weren't really serious, but wanted to see how we could start planning. Between our 2 entry level jobs, we were pre-approved for like $375,000 home or something crazy. WAY beyond what we were thinking.
I continued to look for townhouses in the $180,000 range. My husband (the dreamer) was looking beyond that.
We had been looking in Lehi, Thanksgiving Point area, Herriman, Riverton neighborhoods, but all of Ross' family was living in Heber City. He had gone up there one night to help his brother and ended up driving by a quick move in home with Edge Homes. A quick move in is a home that a builder has that maybe someone started building but had to back out; sometimes a builder will a couple homes in a subdivision for homeowners that don't have 9 months to wait and build.
Ross drove me up and we fell in love at a $275,000 price tag.
We put our lease to our apartment on KSL and had someone willing to buy out our contract but they needed to be in by the end of the week! We chatted with Ross' sister and she offered us a room in her basement! Crazy side of that story - she had 6 kids and Ross' other sister and husband were already living with her. It was a full house but tons of fun!
We got our lending papers together and started waiting impatiently for our rural loan to go through. Finally, 2 months later, in the middle of Lake Powell, we got an email that our loan was going through and we'd sign papers as soon as we got back!
We moved in to our perfect 1620 square foot rambler (plus 1620 in the basement) on a .24 acre lot. We lived there for just shy of 4 years. We brought 2 babies home to that house, finished half the basement ourselves, repainted the whole house, put in the front and back yards, vinyl fencing, cabinets in the laundry, installed a backsplash, switched out a fiberglass shower stall, retiling it and cultivated the most amazing garden!
As life keeps going and we had our girls, we both felt I should stay home with the girls. Ross found another job that was able to do that, but money was tight. We were certainly house poor for a while. After a couple years and a couple raises, it didn't feel so tight but Ross' boss at the time said something that impacted us.
Managing your finances is all about cash flow - how much cash you have to spend at the end of the month.
The market was awesome and could provide us with some amazing equity. Putting that equity into a house that was less than our current house, eventually would provide us with $400 extra dollars a month. In some situations, $400 might not seem like a lot, but it is with 3 little kids and 3 sets of diapers with preschool and dance classes looming. We decided on a whim to get our house ready to sell, and we'd leave the beautiful Heber Valley for the Salt Lake city life, getting Ross' commute a little less.
We met with one agent who told us there was no way we'd get over $385,000, but we were confident, and really not looking to move, if we couldn't get another $15,000. We decided we would try FSBO (for sale by owner) first and if that didn't work, we'd get with an agent.
With Heber being a small town, I listed our home on KSL and linked it to Heber's Facebook page. We had 4 showings and 2 offers the first week. We accepted a full ask offer at $399,000, no conditions and were under contract!
But with no place to move our family to...
Continued in Part #2
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