A few question about how to use this forum (foreclosures, mortgage, Realtors)

[Piney Creek]

Good morning! We are a married couple who will be moving to Williamsburg,VA for retirement. The plan is to downsize to a house somewhere between 1500-2500 sf with a relatively small, low maintenance lot. We have realtors both for buying the new house and selling the old house and I ask them a lot of questions, LOL. I would like to hear opinions from this forum, however. I always find it wise to get opinions from a group, not just one person (even though I like my realtors and think they're savvy).

I have a list of 10-15 topics/questions I'd like to see discussed. Since I have a lot, I thought I should start off by asking about forum protocol. I don't want to wear out my welcome, LOL.

1. Some questions were answered, or at least partially answered, by doing a search on this forum. For partially answered questions, should I "bump" the older thread and post my question at the end of it, or start a new one?

2. Regarding the rest of my questions, should I list them all in a single post? Or post a separate thread for each topic?

3. My guess for Question #2 is you'll want me to start different threads. If so, how often may I post a question? Several a day or would you prefer I post just one every few days? I don't want to annoy people but I also don't want to wait too long to ask some of these things.

[Piney Creek]

A little background on us:

We've owned a few homes over the years, but it's been about 20 years since the last time we bought a house. Things have changed!

For previous moves, we'd move to a new town for a job, and pick a house/neighborhood in a few days. There just wasn't much time to buy a house, so we'd pick a place close to the new job based on which one of the available choices we liked the best. This time around, we're retiring. Which means we don't need to be close to a job and we have all the time in the world. House buying will be quite a different experience this time around.

The last time we bought, there was no way to preview houses on a computer. I learned about neighborhoods a little bit by going to a library and reading the local newspaper. We had to rely on luck, common sense, and an attitude of being happy with something that was good enough (instead of looking for a dream home).

I guess we were very lucky, we always ended up with homes we loved even though we had no idea of so many pitfalls we should have been watching for. Sometimes when I read these forums I get scared of all the things that could potentially go wrong. I'm kind of glad I never thought about these things when we were younger. But like I said, I guess we were lucky. My husband is a little afraid to leave our current house because we don't have any problems with it. But we need to move to a new town, so we'll just have to hope for the best and keep our eyes open when we can.

Also, it never occurred to us to change the features of the homes we bought, we just learned to live with whatever they came with. One house had a built in ballet barre and mirrors, for example. Never bothered to remove it, we just used it for folding sheets and appreciated the mirror when we needed to check out our outfits. The most we ever did was repaint and re-carpet from time to time. I see these shows on HGTV where people move a fireplace because it would look better on another wall, or they tear out all the walls so that there will never be a second of the day that they don't see all their children and I think "Times have changed." So I hope my questions will allow us to understand this new world of home buying. This time we want to do things differently. Or at least think about doing things differently.

[LifeIsGood01]

Originally Posted by Piney Creek

Good morning! We are a married couple who will be moving to Williamsburg,VA for retirement. The plan is to downsize to a house somewhere between 1500-2500 sf with a relatively small, low maintenance lot. We have realtors both for buying the new house and selling the old house and I ask them a lot of questions, LOL. I would like to hear opinions from this forum, however. I always find it wise to get opinions from a group, not just one person (even though I like my realtors and think they're savvy).

I have a list of 10-15 topics/questions I'd like to see discussed. Since I have a lot, I thought I should start off by asking about forum protocol. I don't want to wear out my welcome, LOL.

1. Some questions were answered, or at least partially answered, by doing a search on this forum. For partially answered questions, should I "bump" the older thread and post my question at the end of it, or start a new one?

2. Regarding the rest of my questions, should I list them all in a single post? Or post a separate thread for each topic?

3. My guess for Question #2 is you'll want me to start different threads. If so, how often may I post a question? Several a day or would you prefer I post just one every few days? I don't want to annoy people but I also don't want to wait too long to ask some of these things.

I would not bump old threads, people may not see your post and they will answer the OP original poster's answer and then someone will tell the other person they are responding to an old thread, you still can, but I wouldn't bump old threads.

You can start new ones. People will only answer in ones you they are interested in or feel they can have input and help on.

If your questions all pertain to the same issue you can post them in one thread. There are subforums here such as mortgage, realtors and foreclosures. There is also a house forum and you can also post in the Virginia forum for local insight.

[FalconheadWest]

You don't want to try to keep up with 10-15 threads. You should group your questions together so all the ones that might relate to each other are grouped. If you have a few stragglers, there is nothing wrong with asking 3-4 questions in the same post.