Please note: this article is in no way giving advice on what to do or how to prepare in buying a home. This is our experience of the home buying process.
We knew buying a home was going to be a long and possibly difficult process. Though we didn’t realize how much we truly didn’t know about buying a home. We started this process all the way back in 2019 and one thing we did know was that we were going to need to move in the next 2 to 3 years. This was due to our landlords we were renting from were planning on coming back within the next 3 to five years.
Now we didn’t know exactly when this was going to happen or how much notice they would give us, but we knew it was going to be sooner than later. This realization prompted us to begin weighing our options. Should we continue renting? What are the pros and cons of staying in a lease? Is buying a home even an option? How much home can we afford? Would it be worth it to buy a home if the price point wasn’t feasible?
You see, we live in good ol’ sunny California and though we have a 2-hour drive to either the ocean in the west and the mountains in the east, the housing prices can be pretty insane (depending on the location). In the Sacramento and surrounding areas our housing prices have an average of $450k. This is a factor of many and one of them being that a lot of people who work in the bay area (San Francisco, Walnut Creek, etc.) end up coming to Sacramento to live since housing prices are significantly higher in the bay than here.
How insane are we? Buying a house in California seemed impossible with many roadblocks ahead. But we started the process anyway to get a baseline of where we were at.
To our surprise we had a decent budget to work with and were able to qualify for a VA loan thanks to the time, effort, and sacrifice my husband put into the military. We were relieved that buying a house wasn’t out of the picture entirely. We still had a lot of unknowns though like, what are the fees associated? How much are these fees going to be within the loan? How feasible is this amount going to be for the monthly payments? << I say this because even though you may be approved for a “large” sum of money, this does not mean that you should use all of it. After all the taxes, fees, HOA (if applicable), any debt you owe, etc. the amount of money you should actually borrow is most likely much less than your “approved” amount.
After talking and emailing back and forth to our initial lender with these questions, we felt a little more confident moving forward and having a good idea of what we could afford. In these situations, it is better to ask as many questions as you can with your lender. This way you won’t have that sticker shock when you go to put in an offer or sign for a home and you have all these erroneous charges that you had no idea about and now you can’t afford the home you wanted.
Look for the ups and downs of trying to find our home is coming in the next post, stay tuned!
