Location, Location, Location
The easiest thing about buying a house is deciding to do it. One day, which happened to be the same day I wrote another check for an extortionate amount of money to my croup-ridden landlord, I realized that the federal government wouldn't make me pay taxes on the even more extortionate interest that banks charge for mortgages. In practice, that would reduce my annual federal tax debt to approximately 17 cents. (Fair warning to the rabble: stop carping about welfare reform. The mortgage interest write-off is the food stamps of the middle class, except it doesn't involve nearly as much macaroni and cheese.)
The hardest part about buying a house, on the other hand, is everything else. The real estate industry, which is part of the military-industrial complex we've all heard so much about, has tried to make the process easier by publishing 1,427 books, pamphlets, and Web sites that all promise to "educate consumers." None of them actually do that, because if anyone understood the basic premise behind a mortgage -- namely, that a $100,000 house financed over 30 years will actually cost roughly $300,000, of which 66 percent goes directly to a man named Vinny -- no one would ever buy a house. Plus, all the books use ambiguous terms, such as "points" and "amortization" and "Queen Anne Victorian."
I know this because I have read all of the books, give or take 1,422. From that rigorous scholarship, as well as a conversation I had with my friend, real-estate professional Alice Miller, and my own humbling experiences, I've distilled the search for a house into realistic, comprehensible steps.
The first one, which is the most important, is deciding where to live. Realtors like to say that the three most important things to consider when buying property are "location, location, location." They say this because every time they stick a for sale sign in someone's lawn, they stir up enormous amounts of grubicides that, once inhaled, addle the parts of their brain that control speech and short-term memory. The clear-headed among them, like Alice, get their brothers to stick signs in lawns and thus say "location" only once.
On the other hand, the most important thing I had to consider was what I could afford. Actually, this was a wonderful introduction to the home-buying process, because I immediately learned to scale back my expectations. For instance, like everyone else, I wanted a house with a view of the water. Even in Massachusetts, a state bordered by an ocean, my budget dictated that I would have to settle for something with a driveway prone to puddling.
So my wife and I began our house hunt by eliminating every place we could not possibly afford to buy. The entire city of Boston was quickly stricken from the list. Like most of urban America, Liberty's chosen home offers a few great neighborhoods at ridiculous prices, marginal neighborhoods at inflated prices, and lousy neighborhoods at plain old expensive prices. So my wife and I began moving out in concentric circles.
Actually, we moved in only one direction, which is a quirk peculiar to Boston. People here are neatly divided into categories: North Shore people, who prefer rocky coastlines and charming fishing harbors; South Shore people, who enjoy strip malls; and Western Suburbs people, who have more money than the shore people, unless they're forced to move really far west.
We went north. Slowly. There were too many towns to eliminate for too many reasons.
*****
Fore more on buying your home, selling your home and finding your home's value on line, visit www.domania.com.
The hardest part about buying a house, on the other hand, is everything else. The real estate industry, which is part of the military-industrial complex we've all heard so much about, has tried to make the process easier by publishing 1,427 books, pamphlets, and Web sites that all promise to "educate consumers." None of them actually do that, because if anyone understood the basic premise behind a mortgage -- namely, that a $100,000 house financed over 30 years will actually cost roughly $300,000, of which 66 percent goes directly to a man named Vinny -- no one would ever buy a house. Plus, all the books use ambiguous terms, such as "points" and "amortization" and "Queen Anne Victorian."
I know this because I have read all of the books, give or take 1,422. From that rigorous scholarship, as well as a conversation I had with my friend, real-estate professional Alice Miller, and my own humbling experiences, I've distilled the search for a house into realistic, comprehensible steps.
The first one, which is the most important, is deciding where to live. Realtors like to say that the three most important things to consider when buying property are "location, location, location." They say this because every time they stick a for sale sign in someone's lawn, they stir up enormous amounts of grubicides that, once inhaled, addle the parts of their brain that control speech and short-term memory. The clear-headed among them, like Alice, get their brothers to stick signs in lawns and thus say "location" only once.
On the other hand, the most important thing I had to consider was what I could afford. Actually, this was a wonderful introduction to the home-buying process, because I immediately learned to scale back my expectations. For instance, like everyone else, I wanted a house with a view of the water. Even in Massachusetts, a state bordered by an ocean, my budget dictated that I would have to settle for something with a driveway prone to puddling.
So my wife and I began our house hunt by eliminating every place we could not possibly afford to buy. The entire city of Boston was quickly stricken from the list. Like most of urban America, Liberty's chosen home offers a few great neighborhoods at ridiculous prices, marginal neighborhoods at inflated prices, and lousy neighborhoods at plain old expensive prices. So my wife and I began moving out in concentric circles.
Actually, we moved in only one direction, which is a quirk peculiar to Boston. People here are neatly divided into categories: North Shore people, who prefer rocky coastlines and charming fishing harbors; South Shore people, who enjoy strip malls; and Western Suburbs people, who have more money than the shore people, unless they're forced to move really far west.
We went north. Slowly. There were too many towns to eliminate for too many reasons.
*****
Fore more on buying your home, selling your home and finding your home's value on line, visit www.domania.com.
posted by the domaniac at 10:58 AM
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