Homes
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Letting Professionals Do the Heavy Lifting
When buying our first home, I was afraid that I’d quickly feel as though I was in over my head. Thankfully, though, that didn’t really happen. Then again, that’s undoubtedly because we surrounded ourselves with professionals who were able to do a lot of the leg work for us as well as “hold our hands”…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Mortgage Payments vs. Monthly Payment
Even if you’ve never owned a home, you’re probably aware that there are several regular expenses you’ll need to concern yourself with. Yet, something you might not realize is that what’s often referred to as your “mortgage payment” typically encompasses more than your interest and principal. So what’s the difference between a mortgage payment and…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: How an Apple Card Can Affect Your Mortgage Application
Buying my first home was quite an experience. For the most part, it was a positive one — yet there were moments where I was completely dumbstruck and, to quote Will Ferell, felt like I was taking crazy pills. One such moment happened as we were looking to secure pre-approval for our mortgage. As I’ll…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The Spam & Scams After Buying
In case you missed it, I recently kicked off a new “Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer” series here on Fioney. Although I will cover major topics and share my own experience with them throughout this series, I also want to highlight some aspects of buying a home that I had never heard of before…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The Story of How We Bought a House
In 2015, my wife and I moved to Springfield, Missouri. At the time, while we originally elected to rent an apartment, we figured we’d eventually be able to buy a house here thanks to the lower cost of living and easy-going housing market. Despite this, although we’d revisited the idea from time to time, it…
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How to Redeem Bilt Points Toward a Down Payment, Closing Costs
When I first reviewed the Bilt Mastercard, I noted that the platform boasted an option to redeem points toward the purchase of a home. At the time, I couldn’t even find anywhere that stated the value of this option let alone how to actually do it. Thankfully, since then, Bilt has added features that emphasize…
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So, We Bought a House: What Changed My Mind About Owning
As Ferris Bueller once declared, “Life moves pretty fast.” A mere three weeks ago, I wrote about how my wife and I had resumed our home search after several years and were taking baby steps toward buying. Well, damn — that baby learned how to run. Recently, my wife and I ended up putting in…
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Resuming My (Potential) Home Buying Quest – 7 Years Later
Seven years ago, I wrote an article highlighting the steps we were taking as we began looking at potentially buying a home. Well, since then, we have had a few more rounds of regularly sending each other Zillow listings but haven’t taken any further steps. Incidentally, just a few weeks ago, I wrote another post…
