First Time Homeowners

It still feels like a dream.
We have accomplished a task that seems to be so difficult these days, especially for young families: purchasing a home. With the average price of a home in America at about $200,000 and the average price in New York $300,000, you need to save a lot of money to even begin the process. When wages aren’t increasing for most workers and rent is skyrocketing, it gets harder for young people to get a down payment on a house.

This includes affiliate links. That means that if you purchase through these links that Califf Creations will receive compensation that is of no extra cost to you. This helps cover the costs of Califf Creations.

Now, it is true that you can purchase a home with a down payment as low as 3.5% or just over $10,000 in New York. However, you will have to pay monthly mortgage insurance (PMI) for the life of your loan and this can cost you over $100 extra dollars per month. One major attraction to owning a home is that the money you pay out every month is going toward paying off a loan from the bank instead of into someone else’s pocket like with rent. Paying PMI feels like a waste of money if it can be avoided. Personally, we wanted to avoid paying PMI by having 20% down.

I’ll admit, we had a LOT of help.
We have amazing parents that were in a position where they could gift us money in order to purchase our new home in the form of an “early inheritance”. In the United States, people are allowed to gift up to $15,000 to an individual without being taxed. This was the most amazing gift since we would have had to deplete our savings account entirely and still would have only had about 10%, which means we would have had to pay PMI mortgage insurance. With the gifts from our parents, we were able to buy a beautiful home with 20% down and have some money left over for repairs, minor renovations, and a safety net.

The home buying process was very long for us.
We started several years ago looking at different towns, school districts and types of houses so that we knew exactly what type of home we wanted, and where we wanted it to be. This also allowed us to keep an eye on the market and the price of homes. In our process, we knew we had to stay within a commutable distance to New York City for my husband’s work. That meant being close to public transportation. We looked at various train routes and went town by town looking at schools, the price of homes, and other amenities that were important to us.

Limiting ourselves to locations within an hour and a half of New York City, we finally found a little town we fell in love with near Storm King mountain, along the Hudson River. With good schools, hiking all around and a reasonable commute, we were amazed that the houses were within our budget. The next step was to find the house that would become ours.

We started going to see houses in person.
After getting a real estate agent to represent us, she started to show us some homes. It helps a lot to know what you want. The more specific you can be with your agent, the better they can do at finding places that are to your liking. How many bedrooms do you want? Do you want a large yard? What kind of layout do you like? Do you want a fireplace? What square footage are you looking for? Is it important to have a basement? The more questions you can answer, the narrower your search will become.

As parents, we learned one lesson the hard way. Leave the kids at home when you look at houses. The emotions that come up when you see your children run around a house can get in the way of reason. We made an offer on a house after seeing our son play there while we looked at it. It made us blind to many issues with the house that we only saw in the home inspection. This is why the home inspection is so important. It points out what you may have missed. I believe that if we had seen that house without our son with us, we may not have gone forward with the inspection, which can be a decent amount of money on its own.

The house we ended up buying was one we saw without our son. Even though he wasn’t with us, we could see him running around and playing in the yard. We pictured him playing in the basement and hanging out with us in the living room. This is how we knew it was the home for us.

The next step was to find a mortgage company.
I’m not very knowledgeable about this, to be honest. The best I could do was speak to a few different banks and companies and see what rates I may get. I also paid attention to how people explained the process to me. It was important to us that we felt comfortable with the person we would work with. The whole process is much easier when you are working with a person who communicates well with you.

Once negotiations were complete and contracts were signed, the mortgage process actually starts. They looked into employment history, credit, finances, and tax history before approving us. There were many documents that had to be collected and sent to them. This is where it helped to have a representative that was available and easy to work with. Whenever we had a question, we quickly got an answer that was easy to understand.

Then, we had to get to closing.
In New York State, there is more to closing that in any other state. it is also more expensive than anywhere else. This is due to the fact that you need an attorney, there are extra taxes to pay, and you need an entire year worth of property taxes paid upfront. There is a lot of technical explanation to why this is the case and I’m not familiar with it all, but if you are interested in hearing some of what I learned about this feel free to contact me.

Another thing that can be annoying is that the closing date that gets set in the contract, is not really the closing date. Both parties have 30 days after that date before they are considered to be in breach of contract. For example, we set the date of May 4th in the contract to close. However, we did not actually close until May 22nd and we had to fight to get it to that date as the sellers wanted to wait even longer. It can make it really hard to plan since we didn’t even find out the closing date officially until about 2 weeks before.

We got the keys!
On the closing date, we did a final walk-through of the house to ensure nothing was destroyed, and then we had to get down to business. There were what seemed like hundreds of papers to sign for the mortgage, and more to sign for the title company. An hour and a half later, and the keys were handed to us and we owned the home! It was an amazing feeling.

We drove back to what was now OUR home and unlocked the door for the first time. My husband picked me up, carried me inside, and we both couldn’t stop smiling! We felt so accomplished and proud to own a beautiful home in a wonderful town that we could raise our children in. We are truly blessed. Our children will never have to move and will grow up in a place they can call home.

Now starts the long process of settling in.
It is time to make the house our own. To us, this meant putting new carpets on the stairs, hallway, and bedrooms. We repainted the bedrooms and the dining room and we moved all our stuff in. Everything is still in boxes and it may take us a while to fully settle in, but it will be a fun process. We can decorate how we want and change whatever we want without asking permission.

So far, we have plans to create a transportation themed room for our first son, a peter pan themed nursery for our second, a coastal themed dining room, and a fun kid’s play nook under the stairs. Don’t forget to check back for updates on these rooms as well as the many other projects that we keep planning, including taming a wild, overgrown garden!

I’m excited to be on this journey and will share every home improvement project and fun decorating that happens along the way!

Hint: I listed four I will be sharing in this post!