Through out my teenaged and young adult life, I’ve thought about the kind of house I would own one day. When I was younger and had no idea how much things cost, I thought I’d end up in a house similar to the one I grew up in. Four bedrooms, sprawling lawns and a big garage. Then, somewhere in my mid-university days, I actually started looking at homes for sale online, and got a bit of a reality check. The vision of my future home morphed accordingly. It got smaller, more compact, with less of a yard. And I was fine with that, I just wanted to own a home. I’ve continued to stalk MLS ever since.
Recently, I’ve had real estate on the brain again. I’m not going to say that I’m obsessed, but I’m pretty close. I check MLS daily and have all of my favourite starter homes favourited so I can visit them whenever I want. I scope out neighbourhoods, debate the pros and cons of condo vs. town home vs. fully detached with my husband, and I’ve got Ratehub.ca’s mortgage calculator bookmarked on my browser.
I think I might be more interested in home ownership now than ever before because I’m tired of moving from place to place. I’m ready to move into a place and to stay there. I want to be able to buy furniture that fits a particular home, instead of putting it off because “we’re just going to move again soon”, and I want to put down roots and have a neighbourhood to call home.
All that said, I’m still not actually ready for homeownership. Not even close. I think it’s time to start getting ready though. So I’ve come up with my pre-home purchase checklist. Here’s everything I want to accomplish before I’ll consider myself ready to buy a house:
Save At Least $20,000
$20,000 will cover 5% down and closing costs on a $300,000 house. That’ll buy a decent starter home/townhouse/condo in my city and neighbourhood of choice. I say AT LEAST $20,000 because ideally I’d like to put more than 5% down. Closer to $50k would be a better option, but a lot can happen between here and $50,000, so we’ll start with baby steps.
I technically already have $20,000 in savings, but that money is earmarked for important things like retirement savings and my emergency fund. I absolutely do not want to dip into my retirement savings to buy a house, so I’m going to save this money in it’s very own “House Fund”. I haven’t started this fund yet, because I already have the rest of 2014′s saving goals mapped out, but it’ll be on the docket for 2015.
Be Settled in Our Careers
I’m pretty settled in my career – I love what I do – but my husband still isn’t 100% sure that what his profession is what he wants to be doing forever. I understand that, his career has some quirks that I certainly wouldn’t want to live with forever. If he decides to go back to school or retrain for a new career, that would put all house buying plans on hold because who wants to be on the hook for a mortgage while also paying for school and dropping down to one income? Not this girl.
Be In Our “Forever” City
My husband and I have both agreed that we don’t want to live in our rural town forever. It has a lot of great aspects, like it’s proximity to family and reasonable cost of living, but it’s just not for us, not forever. Until we’re settled in our forever city, buying a home would be more of a financial liability than a step up the financial ladder. The last thing I want to do is to buy a house, decide I want to move, and then spend the next year with said house on the market. No thanks. I’ll take my mobility instead.
Other bucket list items include waiting for the market to decline further (I know things are rosy in TO and Van City but Atlantic Canada is an entirely different story) so that my dollars can buy more, but that’ll happen naturally because I won’t be ready to buy for at least another year or two.
Until the above conditions are satisfied, I’ll just keep stalking MLS, sending links of homes to my husband with hysterical exclamations of “This is the one! I want it!” and saving my pennies.
When did you decide you were ready to buy a home? I want to know!