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We have a house in the DC metro area to sell. I'm thinking in about 1 year we'd be ready. But I have no idea how to relocate! Do you sell your house first and then stay with relatives for a while until you find a job in Cary? After all most jobs expect people to start in about 2 weeks after being hired--not possible to sell your house and move that quickly!
How did you work it out? Any advice or comments appreciated!
PS With all the northerners moving down to Cary, don't you worry that it will become as overcrowded and congested as the DC area--just the stress we are trying to escape?!
There are many ways to do a move, and there is no guarantee any of htem will work seamlessly, so just do what works for you.
I would never move w/o my husband having a job lined up. With a family, and a lifestyle I'm comfortable with, I would not take that risk. Others do. I always buy a new house before I sell my old one for a few reasons. One, I don't want to sell my old house too quickly, and then have to buy something I don't love, or have to rent (with kids and pets and lots of stuff, renting is not cheap or easy). So, I prefer to buy first and then sell. The risk of that is obvious--you end up not being able to sell the old house quickly and are stuck w/2 mortgages for an extended time. Or, you end up selling the old house fora lot less than you thought you would, and your new house suddenly seems expensive.
But others do it all different ways. It's totally up to your comfort level.
We have a house in the DC metro area to sell. I'm thinking in about 1 year we'd be ready. But I have no idea how to relocate! Do you sell your house first and then stay with relatives for a while until you find a job in Cary? After all most jobs expect people to start in about 2 weeks after being hired--not possible to sell your house and move that quickly!
How did you work it out? Any advice or comments appreciated!
PS With all the northerners moving down to Cary, don't you worry that it will become as overcrowded and congested as the DC area--just the stress we are trying to escape?!
We put our house on the market in Sept 06 and waited for it to sell before we bought in NC. While the house was on the market in Alexandria, we toured homes in NC on several weekend trips. Then when our Alexandria house went under contract in Dec, we went back down to NC to find a rental.
The plan was to rent for 6 months while we found a place to buy. But as long as we were down there looking at rentals, we also looked at a few more houses. Just so happens we found a house we loved and we put an offer on it contingent upon our house in Alexandria closing. Everything went smoothly and we've been in Cary for 2 months now.
Regarding jobs. My wife and I both kept our Northern VA jobs. The job market is so tight up there - neither of our employers would let us leave. So now my wife works from home and I travel 3-4 days a week until we start getting more work in the Triangle. We figure if the travel/work from home thing doesn't work out - we can always start looking for jobs in the Triangle. But it's been working well so far.
And regrets? No way - we love the Triangle. It's also pretty unlikely that the Triangle could become like DC. There aren't enough jobs. DC has the government and then on top of that all the companies that support the government. Sure, the Triangle has RTP, but that's no where near the size of the U.S. government.
And if it does become the next DC, we'll just move again. Cause if it gets that crowded, housing prices will sky rocket just like they did in Northern VA. So we could sell and move to a less crowded area. I'm not one to fight growth and gripe about how it's changed everything. I'd rather capitalize on it and move on.
Thank you for the great advice. I don't think there's any way my husband could do a commute to Bethesda from Cary, though! I already work from home so it's a possiblity for me to keep my job, but it's chump change compared to my hubby's job. His job provides the benefits as well.
How do you feel about the difference in property taxes? What area of Cary did you select to buy in? Also, if you were renting a place in Cary, how did you get out of the lease when you found a house you wanted to buy?
Thought you might like to know that I do the commute from Raleigh to Bethesda every week.
Its so easy, less stressful and much cheaper for me to live in a big house in Raleigh, fly up to National, rent a place in Bethesda for three nights/ four days than it is to buy a similar place up there and have the stress of the traffic up there to deal with. I get up at 6.15am on Monday, and am at work by 9.
The only downside is being away from the wife for three days; but I won't be working in Bethesda for ever. There will be the odd flight delay but a 44 minute flight is really comfortable.
How do you feel about the difference in property taxes?
Honestly - we didn't really pay attention. We set a monthly budget and worked backwards.
For example, if we only wanted to spend $1500 a month on housing we knew that X would go to the mortgage, Y would go to taxes, and Z would go to hazard insurance. Then we looked up Cary tax rate (1.054%) and estimated the taxes each month.
For a 300k house it would be $300,000 * .01054 / 12 = ~$275.
We figured hazard insurance of about $100 a month.
So on a $1500 a month budget that leaves you with $1500 - $275 - $100 = $1125 for the mortgage.
Assuming a 6% thirty year mortgage (for estimating purposes), you can borrow $1000 for each $6 you pay a month. So $1125 / $6 = 187.5 or $187,500 you can borrow. Add a down payment to the $187,500 and you have the price home you can look at. So a $112,500 down payment will get you a 300k dollar home.
Once we saw what our price range could buy in the Triangle and compared it to what we could buy in Northern VA, it didn't really matter to us which part of the monthly payment went where, we knew the houses in the Triangle were vastly superior for that given monthly budget.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bargainmom
What area of Cary did you select to buy in?
We bought in Northwest Cary. Since we're both in IT and I travel quite a bit, we wanted to be close to RTP and the airport. We also wanted to be close to Durham since that's where my parents live.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bargainmom
Also, if you were renting a place in Cary, how did you get out of the lease when you found a house you wanted to buy?
And we didn't actually rent in Cary - that was just the plan before we found our home on what was supposed to be a visit to find a rental. Since we were coming from a townhome in VA, we thought we'd rent a townhome in Cary for 6 months. When we were looking, there were so many townhomes on the market for rent that it didn't seem too difficult to name your terms for renting. Some owners seemed pretty desperate (we were also looking to rent in Jan, so that's a pretty slow time to rent, they'll take anyone they can get).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Big M
Its so easy, less stressful and much cheaper for me to live in a big house in Raleigh, fly up to National, rent a place in Bethesda for three nights/ four days than it is to buy a similar place up there and have the stress of the traffic up there to deal with. I get up at 6.15am on Monday, and am at work by 9.
The only downside is being away from the wife for three days; but I won't be working in Bethesda for ever. There will be the odd flight delay but a 44 minute flight is really comfortable.
This is almost exactly what I do. Fly up Monday morning into National. Fly back Thursday afternoon. And the 44 min flight beats driving for 4 to 8 hours depending on traffic. Hopefully we'll get more work down here so I won't have to keep this up forever.
May I ask, are you guys in senior management or something? I can't imagine my husband flying up there--he only makes $65 K! I'm not sure that would be worth it. Isn't the airfare alone at least $600 a month?
I'm quite the Bargainhusband and book my flights way in advance to keep the price down. Yes, it does cost a fair bit of money a month; money which I should be putting into savings, but my car is practically redundant now and I'm not losing any money on it as its pretty much worthless. There's two of us working in our household and we live in a very modest North Raleigh house which would cost us three times as much anywhere on a DC metro line.
No, I'm not in senior management. I'm only mid 30! I'm probably the only guy on the 7.05am flight on American wearing polo shirt and jeans and the only one without a Crackberry. Life is good.
We try to be frugal in this household. That way we can spend money on the things we really value like traveling and private education.
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