Mar. 4, 2013
I have never purchased property. But I almost did. In fact, before my husband and I moved to Texas, we seriously considered buying a house where we used to live.
We spent a lot of time researching homebuying in our area and pulled out my old graphing calculator to predict costs based on current interest rates we’d researched, how much money we had and thought we could part with, and home prices we’d found through the Internet. We visited open houses in the neighborhoods we liked. We even compared our situation to what our friends’ homebuying costs were.
All of that was a waste of time, and it wasn’t just because we eventually moved away. First, we had no idea how much home we could actually afford because we hadn’t spoken to a lender or any kind of financial advisor. Second, we couldn’t really compare our unique situation with our friends’ unique situations, no matter how much it seemed we had in common. Finally, we were trying to figure all of these things out without the help of a REALTOR®.
It’s obvious that we didn’t follow through with our plan to buy then, but we learned a valuable lesson for when we do finally start the homebuying process. We won’t waste our valuable time crunching the wrong numbers. We won’t compare our situation to anyone else’s. And we won’t start the process without the help of a Texas REALTOR®.
