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-- Don't buy a home under pressure. Just rent somewhere else. (We had to move when our landlord spotted our cats in the apartment (it was a no-pets apartment). We were under a lot of pressure and bought dumb-ly. Most of what follows below occurred because we bought under pressure.)
-- Don't take a mortgage with a negative amortization! (Corollary: buy when you have enough of a down payment saved up.) This was the early 1980s, when mortgage interest was well north of 13% in our area. We did have the sense to refinance at the first opportunity, but that negative amort did hurt us. It took forever to get to a point where we had any equity in the house.
-- Don't buy a house you think you will make a lot of changes to if you don't have the time or inclination or money to make those changes.
-- Don't do a deal where the real estate agent represents you and the seller.
-- Don't believe a dang thing the realtor says. Geez, he lied about so much, I don't want to even think about it.
-- Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. We pretty much paid what the seller was asking because we were so young, dumb and inexperienced.
-- Hang around the neighborhood if you can before you buy. That way, you might avoid the "surprise" of discovering one of your neighbors is, shall we say, CRAZY.
-- Don't buy a house next to a commercial enterprise (i.e., a business). That could be an entire other thread.
-- Sell in 2006, when the market was completely insane.
-- Buy a little beach house at the Jersey Shore as soon as we were married in the 1980s (could have been had for 50-60 grand at that time). Beg, borrow and steal to do it. Sell it when houses at the shore started going for eye-popping amounts of money so that people with more money than brains could knock it down and build a 3 story McMansion.
Wow, when I look at that list, I realize we made just about every dumb mistake new house buyers could make. And we are still in that original house!
A key issue is how handy you are, and motivated, to do your own home repairs and improvements. If you rely on hiring people to do such work, you have to rely on finding reliable people who will reliably do a good job. That's very hard. It's much easier if you can rely on your own skills and motivation. On the other hand, some people might have more skill at hiring the right people. The unluckiest ones are those who have neither the skills to hire the right people nor the skills to do the work themselves. They should definitely rent.
There is almost no such thing as a trouble free house. If the house were so trouble free, the owners would be very reluctant to sell it. Moving away is only part of the motivation for selling a house. A lot of people take a job in another city for more than one reason. And one of those reasons is to get away from their house.
If a house seems like a nightmare to the seller, and the seller tries to deceive you into thinking it's more of a dream house, it might actually be more of a dream house than a nightmare, but it might be made a nightmare by the seller's incompetence at hiring the right repair people and/or at doing the work themselves. It might be a nightmare because they try to do the work and always do it wrong and have to redo it. So never assume just because a seller is trying to deceive you about a nightmare house, that you will have the same nightmare. On the other hand, your nightmare might be even worse, in some cases. But if you evaluate the situation carefully, you can take advantage of a seller's nightmare, to get closer to your own dream. The worse their nightmare, the more likely they would give you an incredibly good deal.
Also never confront sellers about their lies. Just offer less, but don't mention the lies.
I would have told myself. Don't put that 6K on a house, buy Microsoft stock. Year 1983.
That wouldn't work. When Microsoft started to skyrocket, you would be in a hurry to sell it, to take advantage of your gains before the price would go back down. For it to work, you have to know the whole history of the stock, so you could keep convincing yourself not to sell it. The real advantage of a house is that it isn't an investment.
That wouldn't work. When Microsoft started to skyrocket, you would be in a hurry to sell it, to take advantage of your gains before the price would go back down. For it to work, you have to know the whole history of the stock, so you could keep convincing yourself not to sell it. The real advantage of a house is that it isn't an investment.
But isn't that the point of imagining you could "go back in time"? You would have the knowledge necessary to keep yourself from making dumb mistakes, as I freely admit in my post above.
But isn't that the point of imagining you could "go back in time"? You would have the knowledge necessary to keep yourself from making dumb mistakes, as I freely admit in my post above.
In theory you have a point. But if you could really go back in time, there is no reason why the new future you would then have would have to be identical to the old future. Microsoft might be bankrupt in that future.
In theory you have a point. But if you could really go back in time, there is no reason why the new future you would then have would have to be identical to the old future. Microsoft might be bankrupt in that future.
We are not talking about going back in time and killing Hitler.
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