This isn't technically about home-BUYING per se, but if you can, throw a little extra towards your payment each month. It'll automatically go towards your principal balance and save you a TON in the long run against interest. In a 30 year mortgage like that, the first 10-12 years you're paying between 35%-55% of your payment just towards interest alone.
We do that. Roughly $300/mo extra toward the principal. Basically anything that would be property taxes (we’re exempt) is allotted to the balance. still. I’d sell the fuck out of my house and move north if I could clear a full 100k doing so.
Definitely. I've made payments on two pieces of property and I threw every extra cent I had at them to get the principal down. Get an amortization calculator (Or I'm sure there's one on the internet somewhere) and you'll be amazed how loan payments are applied in the early part of a loan. Somewhere around 90% of the payment goes to interest.
Just saw @wexton 's post int he R&R thread about the property assessment. I repped him that I'm going to get royally fucked soon, I'm sure. My city's official appraisal is around $250k, and the bank's recent appraisal was just under $1m. So much out of whact that when I bought the house, the bank was asking about property taxes, so I sent them to them... and they didn't believe them. "This can't be right... is it a quarterly statement or something?" "Nope... that is the full year's assessment, and I called the city to verify". "Holy shit." Yeah... I have no idea if/when the city is going to get their head out of their asses and catch up to the recent spike in property values, but if they do, I sure hope they have some sort of rate limit on that adjustment.
I posted about this place a while back, about how it was so similar to our house that it could be used as a comp for an appraisal. And that it is priced $435,000 more than we paid for ours. And that I what it did would weigh on the decision whether we put ours on the market. It is now under contract, according to realtor.com. On one hand, I don't want to move, but the ROI might be too much to pass up.
Just so you know, selling property values are oftentimes very drastically different than what a city/county assesses your home value at for taxing purposes. For example, at least in my area, our property was just reassessed last year by the county for a value of $274,500. We just did a refinance in November and the bank's appraisal had our property value at almost $350,000 due to market conditions and comps. So, just because your bank says your house is worth one value doesn't necessarily mean it's going to line up for tax values. But then again, you live in Canada where they probably calculate taxes using loonies and rods, so who the hell knows.
Lol. Ours was around $3700 with a payment in full discount and I just paid a bit over $4100 this time.
That's over double the 5% cap you mentioned. That's also really damn steep. Can you do a homestead exemption in Oregon? I know it dropped my tax bill in Mississippi massively.
I may be rounding slightly but we've been here several years now. That's the first and third years assessments. My brother in law does our taxes. If it's possible it's been done.
Looked it up, the MAV can't increase more than 3% but there are other ways your overall tax bill can be increased (edit like bond measures, which we had several). I'll stop talking about how they get to their number because I am far from a expert.
Just came back to complain about the stupid market I live in. Was planning to see a house listed a little above our budget but substantially less than we are approved for. It was under contract in less than 24 hours and sold for $161k over asking price. I never thought a 1400sqft 3/2 ranch would feel so aspirational. Maybe we need to suck it up and start doing some real improvements to our shitty condo since it looks like we may be here forever. Womp womp.
Yeah that’s pretty rough. We had similar issues where we’d fall in love with a house, put (we thought) was a generous offer in and someone would swoop in and offer $100k over asking, all cash. It’s disheartening, but it won’t last forever.
With the rate Chinese conglomerates with unlimited cash are buying up properties dont know about that. Selling my gradndads beach house (Florida has gone completely bonkers) we listed it for like 2 and within a week head an offer for 2.25 cash. The buyers acted like it was a father son thing where the rich dad was buying this single house as an investment property for his son. Turned out it was a huge real estate investment firm that had bought dozens of properties on the island. Looking at the comps selling now just a year later it'd be 2.75.
It's a bad time to be trying to get in. This bubble seemingly SHOULD have to pop sometime, but all these corps (especially those from out of the country....wtf how is this legal) buying up properties is just launching it higher and higher. I definitely think this is something that should be addressed by legislation, but it makes the right people money so it probably won't be fixed anytime soon. These ever climbing prices are killing middle and lower income people trying to buy for the first time. Our house has increased in value over 45% in the ~3.5 years we've lived here. There is no way we could afford to buy now.
RVs are hard to find in Florida now because Florida itself is running out of affordable land to build on near population centers. Never mind the housing costs. So people are just getting rv trailers and parking them on like their brother in law’s place and treating it like an apartment.
Space to put your RV is impossible to find here. People have been doing that for awhile but now it's at it's max capacity. RV parks, camp sites, state parks, all filled all the time.