I'm typing this from Ludington with Meredith, so these tips come from both of us.

1)  If you're buying a bank-owned home (typically a foreclosure), plan on a very long bargaining process.  A simple communication with a personal owner takes a day at most.  With a bank, it takes weeks.

2)  You can save a metric crap-load of money buying a house that needs maintenance, but the maintenance is always larger, more expensive, and more time-consuming than it first appears.  This is particularly true with older homes.

3)  If you want a buyer's agent (a real estate agent that represents you, highly recommended), you can ask the seller to pay the cost for the agent as part of the closing costs.

4)  This is a bit cliché, but it's all about location.  You can change everything about the house inside and out, but moving your house is generally not an option.  Our house is great for a first house, but the size of the property and location in the middle of the city means it'll never be our dream home.  I'd recommend thinking about how long of a timeline you're thinking of.  Is this a starter house, or do you want to buy a house that will last you until you die?

5)  You'll have the option of getting a survey done when you buy the house.  It's pricy ($500 to $1,200 if you have the corners marked), so we opted not to have the survey.  In hindsight, we should have had the survey done.  Now, we're looking at scheduling a survey in the next couple months.

6)  Once you find a house you want to bid on, talk to your friends and coworkers for recommendations before you hire a house inspector.  The house inspection is super, super important, so you want an excellent inspector to make sure the house isn't going to burn down or fall over as soon as you move in.

7)  Buying a house is expensive.  I can hear you saying "Derp!" from here, but the actual buying process is more expensive than we anticipated.  You have to come up with money for the realtor (assuming you use a buyer's agent), the inspector, the radon test, the survey, closing costs, de-winterizing for the inspection (if applicable) and a couple other things that escape me at the moment.  You can roll a lot of these costs into the mortgage, but you still have to keep the mortgage below your lender's loan-to-value ration (meaning a higher down payment).  Fortunately, we had a good down payment that we could "borrow" from to pay some of the unexpected up-front costs.  Don't forget about moving costs!

8)  Don't forget to calculate house insurance and taxes into your monthly payment estimates.  If your down payment is less than 20% of the value of the house, add another $20-30 into the payment for PMI.


I'm sure we'll think of a bunch of other stuff, but there's a list for tonight!


-b0b & Mere
(...teamwork!)