Last time I left you with the end of our house hunt! We found the home of our dreams and put in an offer, but I left out some important details that went into the process. In this post we'll be talking about the home inspection and other important home buying details!
Price Point
When deciding when to buy a home, especially when you go house hunting, you need to keep your monthly spending plan in mind. How much do you want to pay for your mortgage and how much can you actually afford? Last blog post I mentioned the term Price Point – A price point is the big dollar you are willing to go to pay for your home. Think of it as purchasing a car, what do you want your monthly payment to be. The higher the price point, the higher your monthly mortgage will be.
**Mortgage lenders will qualify for you for the highest amount possible. Keep in mind your spending plan that way instead of looking $350,000 homes you're looking at $200,000 homes. **
Home Inspection
When working with your realtor, make sure that in the contract of your new home that a home inspection is contingent on purchasing the property. An inspection will provide an in-depth and impartial evaluation of any problems with the home. Your realtor will be able to offer some suggestions of qualified inspectors they've worked with before. If there aren't any problems, you can proceed, but if there are make sure that you are either financially compensated or the owners remediate the problem. Recently I had friends who found termites in their new home and they worked with the seller to remediate the problem before they moved in.
Hopefully this post helps to clarify some of the topics I discussed in Sasha Learns: How to Buy a House – The Hunt. Next time I'll be discussing "The Players" who helped us in purchasing our house! For those of you ready to buy a house in the near future check out eXtension's resource on Buying a Home!
This post continues a series on Sasha's journey through the puzzling world of buying a house for the first time. You can find other posts in the series by clicking Home Ownership in the Category list on the right side of this page.