Home Buying Tips
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The 5 Scariest Things We’ve Experienced as Homeowners (So Far)
This week is Halloween! It will actually be our second as homeowners and, if last year is anything to go by, we can expect at least a handful of trick-or-treaters (after having none at our apartment). But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. Instead, I thought I’d take this thematic opportunity to…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Two Years Since
It has come to my attention that I’ve reached a bit of a milestone. This week marks two years since my wife and I put in an offer on a house. Funny enough, shortly after we made that offer and it was accepted, we caught a flight to Hong Kong and continued the process of…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Can I Refinance Yet?
Last month, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by another quarter point. While that’s bad news for my high-yield savings accounts (which, in turn, reduced their APYs), the potential silver lining would be a dip in mortgage rates. As I’ve shared before, when we bought our house, we had to accept a rate of 7.999%.…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Do You Know Your Neighbors?
A funny thing happened to me as I set off on my way to FinCon last week. As I got into my Uber, the driver said, “We don’t know each other, but I actually live right over here.” By “right over here,” he literally meant two doors down. After making this realization, we chatted a…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Comparing Our Mortgage to Rental Options
When we decided to buy a house, a huge consideration was how much we’d be spending on a monthly basis. Sure enough, once you factor in our mortgage (complete with 7.999% interest), insurance, and property tax, our monthly payments were an increase from what we were paying for our apartment, coming in at around $1,500.…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Why a Pole Pruner is Our New Favorite Outdoor Tool
A few months ago, we called a tree guy out to come take a look in our yard and let us know what work he’d recommend we do. As I recalled in a previous post, this interaction left me with some intriguing insight and didn’t cost me anything, as he didn’t see a need for…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Navigating Our First Serious Power Outage
Last weekend, following another brief but powerful windstorm, we were left without power. Although we’ve had our power go out for a couple of hours here and there since moving to our house, this was the first time that we and a large section of our neighbors were left sans electricity for several hours. And…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The Next Evolution of Our Basement
Since we moved into our house about 18 months ago, it seems as though our relationship with our finished basement continues to evolve. To catch you up, the initial intent for this space was a family room/guest room — but the sofa bed’s inability to fit down the stairs scrapped that plan. And while it…
