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.
Ok, so we got approved and we have a budget! Now we just need to find a place in the Sacramento area that is within that budget… this is going to be hard. As I mentioned in the previous post, housing prices are insane (in my opinion a little stupid for the quality of most used homes), but here we go.
Our next item on the to do list is to figure out which neighborhoods we would want to live in and how realistic it would be for us to afford a house in that neighborhood. Being the Sacramento area, we have a lot of areas to choose from, the only problem is, which ones are safer than others for our family to grow up in and can we afford that area? Granite bay is nice, but expensive. Folsom is nice, can be within the budget, but far. East Sac is nice, but waaayyy out of budget (lol, I’m talking million-dollar homes). Other places can have a decent amount of homeless, a lot of Section 8 housing that can run a house value down. We quickly realized that this was going to be much harder and more daunting than we thought.
So we took a step back and started over. First thing we did now was looked at a map of the Sacramento area. This allowed us to eliminate areas that are too far away very quickly. Now we know that we wouldn’t be staying in our current jobs forever so the distance to those wasn’t much of a factor but we didn’t want to stray too far away from the downtown area as well since that is a major hub of jobs for us. We started to narrow this down now.
Next based on our experience within the various neighborhoods we were able to eliminate more knowing if we felt safe or not. This gave us a reasonable number of neighborhoods to look in and we kept an open mind about new areas we had not visited yet. While we weren’t “officially” looking to move within the year, we wanted to dip our feet in and get a feel for what the current housing market was like.
After months of looking at home buying apps and a realtor sending us home listings that were not on those apps, we came to realize that if we bought a used home, we would have to do a decent amount of work on it. We accepted this fact but were still hopeful that it would not be terrible. We didn’t want a home that looked run down, but it also didn’t need to be fancy either (we were not opposed to work). We were finding that most homes we could afford in any neighborhood would be at least 15 years old. This meant we could be moving in knowing we would have to make major repairs or appliance replacements within the next 5 years.
This was something that did not sit well with us. First spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the home, then spending our savings to fix the home after barely moving in. That is a lot of money that would be spent in a short amount of time. Knowing this we started to play around with the idea of a new home build. We had no prior knowledge of what is involved with buying a new home, but we figured it didn’t hurt to look.
Well, the first place we went to the home was gorgeous, we loved it! (first mistake)… We looked through the models and went back to the sales office to talk. That is where we found out the hidden expenses associated with a new build home. There was a base home, then most of the features in the model homes that make it look amazing are upgrades. These upgrades require a down payment, anywhere between 20% -30% of the cost of the upgrade and we both knew that the base model was not something we’d be happy with.
This was not something we were prepared for and it made us a little disgruntled with the whole process. We had good jobs that, on paper, should allow us to own a home that looks like the American dream. We paused on our search for our home for the next 6 months.
