Agree to this. It is my first home and I was trying to buy the biggest and best place I could afford and stretching thin. The buying process was becoming stressful where I was sensitive to mortgage rates, etc. Now that I have decided to get an affordable place, the buying process seems to be much smoother.
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Understood.
However, I know it’s stressful and against the grain to stretch but if you’re young, work in a stable industry and know that you can stay employed without a long unemployed timeframe, I totally recommending betting on yourself and buying above your comfort range (but still affordable).
In year 2 or 3 or whatever, you’ll be happier that you got the 3 bedroom place over the 2 bedroom one because you never know if you’ll need that extra space. Or getting the home with the better location (micro or macro) instead of settling due to price.
It’s the people who just outright overspend without taking into account sustaining the outlay. Like back in the late 90s, people were leveraging Option Arms for interest only or even negative payments without understanding that they should be prepared for the full P&I payment and if they couldn’t afford that, they shouldn’t be buying that house.
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Might be dating my age here but I started in 2003, I don’t recall many pay option arms at that time. 2003 was a refi boom and generally those refi boom years are mostly 30 yr fixed mortgages. Pay option arms were huge in the 06-08 range but I would argue people got them to buy a home because the thinking at that time was “Home values will never go down”. I’m not sure people used them to buy a bigger home for the space but rather a bigger home to get higher appreciation dollars. Then when the bottom fell out - they just walked away “jingle mail”. Those pay option arms in 06-08 were more for an investment than buying a true forever home. Just my 2 cents from here on the East Coast from almost 20 yrs ago now!
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Any advice on getting a home-owner’s insurance (HO-5). I know people here prefer an umbrella. I guess first thing would be to contact the car insurance companies to try to get a bundle.
Should I be contacting the broker or doing shopping myself is the way to go? Also is local company better than a bigger one?
Any trick to keep the spam to a minimum?
What’s your favorite credit card company?
Benefit of a broker is that they can shop multiple insurance carriers for you and recommend one based on your needs. They probably will also have insight on which carriers are easier/more reasonable to work with in event of a claim. You can also check what your auto insurance company quotes with a bundle – sometimes it can be cheaper to just bundle, particularly if you have multiple policies, like business insurance.
Umbrella insurance supplements your other policies, not replace them. Auto insurance companies usually bundle them. I have mine through RLI as a standalone policy.
You are correct… the big boom in Pay Option ARMs was in the mid 2000s and it was in many cases people trying to cash in on appreciation or buying homes they really could not afford (since qualifications were so lax back then).
We did get one but because we stuck it out… our full P&I payment actually got smaller because rates dropped and then when prices went back up after 2010, not only did we have equity but we had a really cheap loan. We moved up after that, used a 7-1 Option ARM for the lower start rate… and then when rates dropped even more refi’d into a fixed rate that was lower than our ARM.
Problem is now, rates and prices are so high, we can’t really move and while we can stay here, we would rather downsize once the kids move out and maybe parlay the equity into buying property for our kids.
It’s hard to do any of that today, but at least you can find loan products with cheaper rates on ARMs (as you can see my “hack” is use adjustables when rates are high, and fixed when rates are low).
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Right now I’m using Bank of America card since I got no apr for 18 months.
People who bought at the top of that bubble had to wait about 10 years to get even. That’s possible to happen again in this market. I don’t think there will be as drastic of a crash sans and external event crashing all markets, but I think a period of stagnant appreciation is coming to the real estate market. Regionally things will certainly vary as always.
I got into real estate investing during that downturn and it was an amazing time to accumulate property. Low prices and low rates, huge cap rates on rentals. It was inevitable that the corporations would join the party.
I’m waiting to buy bc my rental market is flipped where I am. Much cheaper to rent then buy at the moment. I’d onky suggest buying into the market if it’s the house you want to be in for 10+ years or you live in an area that pricing didn’t increase 2-300% the last 5-8 years.
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Hit up all of the above, especially since you have a SFH. Bundling may or may not necessarily be cheaper.
My last two home insurers were actually more commercial focused but happened to have a residential product when I was looking. SoCal is difficult now since many insurers have pulled out and the weather now is just gonna raise costs in the near future.
Some of us bought in a “hot” market over a year before it popped, and sold more than 10 years later at a loss 
These tips and more are available in my Masterclass.
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How to lose money on a house by way of runaway inflation and shitty timing? 
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And $80k in improvements that will “100%” raise the resale value.
Would you believe the AH that stole it from me emailed 4 years later to ask the age of roof and 10 other questions that should have been in his inspection, then ventilated to me about his annoyance that he had to pay for repairs?
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Discussion was derailed approximately here.
Please keep this thread about mortgages, not macroeconomic tangents.
57 posts were split to a new topic: Real estate discussion
For those who paid off their house do you need any documents before filing taxes this year?
If you paid off mortgage in 2023, mortgage company should send you 1098 outlining interest and property taxes they paid. If you paid your own property tax, you’d need to know how much.
Probably better off taking standard deduction over itemizing for most people/house scenarios.
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Hello Hackr’s, First time home buyer here. Does Rocket or Better offer rate match to the Local CU rate? or any other CU recommendations to follow. this would be for a new construction in Maryland, Fredrick County.
Of the purchases and refinances I’ve done, not a single time have I found the best loan pricing at a credit union.
Rocket has historically been the outlier for me (pricing has been absurdly on the high side). They aren’t primarily a mortgage company, they’re primarily a sales organization (that happens to do mortgage loans). Caveat emptor.
Unfortunately there is no substitute for doing a lot of shopping.
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Same. Best pricing was always random but never a CU for me. Every time I shopped, Better and Rocket were among the worst rates. Shame, since I would have loved to take advantage of the Amex offers a few years ago but they refused to match since the delta was so big.
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Random is a good word.
I’ve also never gotten the best deal at the same place twice.
We’ve even refi’d two places simultaneously – and used two different mortgage companies, because neither offered the best terms for both loans.
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