This is a collaborative post
When I can’t sleep I often think of moving house and spend time looking on Right Move for the properties available in the area along with finding the most bizarre homes and those completely out of reach for millions! Do you do this too? If your house hunting at midnight then turns into real house hunting and a plan to move these tips should help.
Tips for budgeting and financing your new home
One of the first things you should do is to look into your budget. How much do you pay for your current home, is this tight or could you increase this? Working out all your incomes and expenditures can help with this but remember to be realistic. If you spend £20 a week on coffees at Costa then there is no point pretending you don’t unless you can genuinely stop spending this to save. Equally, remember to add in things like birthdays and Christmas.
When you know what you can afford each month you can use a mortgage calculator and see how this fits with house prices. Alternatively, use an affordability calculator to help. It is really easy to add the price for your perfect home to the mortgage calculator, the deposit you have (this may be the equity in your current home) and see how much the repayments would be and check that against your budget. This is my calculation for a £300,000 house (I saw a nice one when I couldn’t sleep last night!) with a £50,000 deposit over 25 years. If you know the interest rate you would borrow with that can be altered too but I just used the prepopulated estimate of 2.29%
Tips for finding the perfect house
Here are a few things to check out before you even view a home so that you do not waste your time and know if a house truly would be right for you.
- Check the council tax band – easy to do online and may mean an increase to your expenditure monthly so needs to be considered.
- Check the distance from schools, work and future schools if you have young children.
- Is the freehold for sale or will there be additional costs?
- Check out government help to buy your first home
- Has the house been sold a number of times over recent years? This could be a red flag, check Zoopla and Rightmove for listing history and sales history.
- If you are buying a home to rent out then check the local rental costs to see if it would be financially viable. It is usually simple to do this just search, for example, average rent in San Diego, California as well as looking at properties currently on the market for rental.
- Check if the property has a water meter, this again could change your outgoings significantly.
- Check local planning applications for the neighbours, the area in general and any green areas near the house. This can be done easily online but stops you from even looking at a house that has countryside views if you wouldn’t want the new estate that has been planned for as an alternative view!
- Measure your current rooms and compare them to the rooms of the home you are considering, it can be easy to think you need a certain size room and realise on measuring you need bigger, or smaller!
Do you have any other top tips? Have you spotted nice houses that make you tempted to move house when you can’t sleep? Do comment below and let me know!