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Forum -> Inquiries & Offers -> Moving/ Relocating
Buy the Expensive BIG house or the cheaper, smaller house?`
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octopus




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 05 2010, 7:04 pm
I guess it all depends on how much you are putting down to begin with. If you are putting down a lot, in the long run an extra 100,000 shouldn't really make a difference. Maybe though, your property tax will be more if you go with the bigger property.
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sky




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 05 2010, 7:14 pm
amother wrote:

otoh, to get a house that some rooms will be empty and you'll have to really beg, borrow and steal for?
.


I wouldn't do this ever.
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WriterMom




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 05 2010, 7:37 pm
We've been talking about this ourselves. Part of me wants MORE SPACE, whether or not it makes financial sense. I want a bigger kitchen/eating area (the table has to go diagonal when we have company), I want another bedroom ... but DH argues that we don't actually NEED it, we just want it. When we first married we had the chance to buy the condo we lived in, because the owner wanted to sell and it turned out the mortgage payments were the same as rent. (plus condo fees, and utilities, so we were spending more per month, but not tons more.) He says that living well within our means meant we could build equity and get a house when we needed more space, so he'd rather see us pay off more of tiny-house and use that to buy the bigger house when we need it. I basically agree, this does make the most sense.

There are a couple of other factors, tho - as the poster above said, a house with a higher price tag that requires no work at all and comes with appliances and carpet and curtains might not be much more expensive IRL than a house with a smaller price that will need work and appliances etc. Also, if you're a first time buyer and you keep a keen eye out, you could benefit from the disastrous housing market and get something that you would never have been able to afford a few years ago. This isn't much use to people who are selling one house to buy another, because both prices are lower, but if you can get someone's foreclosed McMansion (or whatever) so be it!
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amother


 

Post Tue, Jan 05 2010, 8:01 pm
OP here - thanks everyone...

So, we wouldn't rent out a basement, we really do not want tenants. As to whether we can afford this ridiculous house, dh and I are of differing opinions. I'm more budget conscious, he thinks we can afford anything. Scrimping, budgeting are not really in his mindset. And, because we get financial help at the moment from his parents, he's kind of right. How long will the help continue - I have no idea.

As for needing a guest room, my inlaws sleep over for shabbos, or for a night, every other month or so, and we have guests rarely besides. I wouldn't want my kids to have to move, so there would have to be a space, even in the basement... We would have to put them in the bigger children's room, because the other bdr can't fit two beds in most houses. So that wouldn't really make sense.
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qeenB




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 05 2010, 8:25 pm
one more thing to keep in mind is the maintanence costs which include utilities are going to be more money with a larger house. (also a bigger house takes longer to clean.)
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amother


 

Post Wed, Jan 06 2010, 6:47 am
sky wrote:
I would say go with what you can afford. Do you see yourself soon making additional money to afford the bigger house?

Also, don't buy a bigger house just for the guest room unless you have guests every week. You can always move a kid out of their room for the night.

don't forget a bigger house will probably also have higher taxes, be more expensive to heat and cool, and insurance will be higher (and clean if you need cleaning help). You have to add that all into your additional expense.

(And about the kitchen in the previous post - you can kasher a lot. We were able to kasher our counters, sink (but we hav only one), stove and microwave. We did not kasher the dishwasher. )


I am the amother who posted I think you should buy the bigger house - and gave you my whole long story...

just to clarify re: kashrus. in the smaller house (the 3 br which we ended up not buying), the counters were formica. there was no way to Kasher that, and it would have needed to be replaced. the sink (it was actually a double sink, even though they were not jewish) was not stainless steel it was porcelean, so there was no way acc to our Rov to kasher it either- would have needed to be replaced. and add to that - since the plumbing was old, if we replaced the sink, we would have needed to do some substantial plumbing work to update it to "codes" legally and stuff. dishwasher was also porcelain on the interior and would have to be replaced. Oven (only had one oven, which was a tremendous pain for me, coming from an apartment with two ovens, but I was ready to deal with it just to be in a house) was the only thing that could be kashered.

The bigger house (the one we ended up buying) had granite countertops, and the sinks and dishwashers (notice plural dishwashers! major treat!) both were stainless steel. the previous owners were frum but were very modern sefardim so their minhagim differed from ours tremendously and our Rov (after speaking to the previous owner) recommended we kasher e/t actually. but it was easy because it was metal and granite so nothing needed to be replaced. ovens (notice the s - 2 ovens!) were put on self clean end of story.

also I should add regarding income. when we bought the house, only DH was working and I was still in school. so we knew in time our income would increase (not double, but it would be substantial)
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amother


 

Post Wed, Jan 06 2010, 6:58 am
amother wrote:
OP here - thanks everyone...

So, we wouldn't rent out a basement, we really do not want tenants. As to whether we can afford this ridiculous house, dh and I are of differing opinions. I'm more budget conscious, he thinks we can afford anything. Scrimping, budgeting are not really in his mindset. And, because we get financial help at the moment from his parents, he's kind of right. How long will the help continue - I have no idea.


OP, I dont know how else to ID myself but to tell you that I was the poster who decided on the 5 bedroom house after almost buying the 3 bedroom house, from yesterday (shoulda chose a color!)

but I think your brought up something monumentally important - being that his parents are providing financial help right now, I think you HAVE to involve them in this discussion! if they are willing and able to help you for a year, two years, until you are 100% confident that you are on your feet, etc, or help you with the down payment, that is a different story. but that IMO is a huge factor.
amother wrote:

As for needing a guest room, my inlaws sleep over for shabbos, or for a night, every other month or so, and we have guests rarely besides. I wouldn't want my kids to have to move, so there would have to be a space, even in the basement... We would have to put them in the bigger children's room, because the other bdr can't fit two beds in most houses. So that wouldn't really make sense.

if the basement is finished (or if you plan on finishing it), can you put up a wall separating part of the space into a makeshift guest room? I also totally agree with you on the shifting around issue with guests, and we also rarely have guests. but still the idea of having to move my kids out of where they are comfortable (esp the baby!) each time someone slept over- a sib, a cousin, parents, etc, would stress me out tremendously! but to each his own.
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amother


 

Post Wed, Jan 06 2010, 7:06 am
qeenB wrote:
one more thing to keep in mind is the maintanence costs which include utilities are going to be more money with a larger house. (also a bigger house takes longer to clean.)


amother from above piping in again, since we dealt with this issue (or rather deal with it!)

these were all factors in our decision.

1 in our area, property taxes are not so high. there was a ~1000 dollar diff in taxes between the larger one and the smaller one. so essentially its about 100 dollars more a month on top of mortgage payments, which themselves are higher. definitely something we took into account, but we said we are not going to split hairs over 1000 dollars a year.

2 re maintenance: not necessarily true. it would have cost way more to heat the 3 bedroom home as it stood, unless we replaced all the windows, since they were so old, the house lost alot of heat. also, the 5 bedroom which we ended up getting, is all brick all around. the 3 bedroom, had metal siding on the sides and back, and only a brick facade in front and part of the sides. this makes a huge difference in insulation costs! and, like I said in my first post on the last page, the first house was quite a steal and had been lived in by the same couple for many years (50 I think). there was alot of work that needed to be done - like plumbing issues, etc. it had not been inhabited by a family, but rather by an older non jewish couple whose consumption of electricity water etc was much lower (not as much cooking, no kids to bathe, etc). we had an engineer come inspect it, and there were structural issues that had to be dealt with, but we figured for such a bargain, its worth our efforts! anyway though my point is, maintenance and upkeep costs are not that simple. when you are talking the diff between a 2 bedroom condo and a 10 room mansion, of course yes. but when you are talking the diff between a 1500 sqft house and a 2000 sqft house, not such a huge diff, and it might be reverse depending on the age of the house.

3 and re taking longer to clean - again - its only two more bedrooms! see my point abt a mansion vs a 2 bedroom condo above. I had a full time babysitter who also cleaned our apt before we moved. her cost did not go up for cleaning our apartment (making beds, washing dishes, doing laundry, basics) to when we moved to a house! her cost went up (I gave her a raise) when I had a third child.
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sky




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Jan 06 2010, 8:17 am
Quote:
...the counters were formica. there was no way to Kasher that


It always pays to ask. Our counters were also formica, we asked a leading posek in our community and were told we were allowed to kasher many things we never imagined that we could. I'm glad it worked out for you. As I said we have one sink, and we have one oven, and didn't have a dishwasher for a while. But I'd rather live in my means with less then always worry about covering the cost of the house.

But being that you paid 250 more - that is slightly less then we paid for our entire house and we couldn't have afforded more at that time. And we weren't willing to take the gamble to buy more then we could afford - especially considering life expenses go up, not down. Plus our property taxes are crazy (they are equal to 1/3 of our monthly morgage payment), had we bought a bigger house, for more money it would be even more. It really depends how much your spending on the house to begin with, and how taxes work in your area.

You realize your morgage is 500 more a month and taxes 100 more a month. I'm guessing your home insurance is also more $$ a month. Some people just don't have an additional 600 + a month over their original purchase budget. That is a lot of money.

I hear that the in your case the small house needed more work - but not all small houses need more work then the big house. Sometimes the big house needs more work, it depends on what you look at.

I'd rather own a house, then have the house own us. And go to sleep every night in my house not scared that I may lose it.
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amother


 

Post Wed, Jan 06 2010, 8:26 am
sky wrote:
Quote:
...the counters were formica. there was no way to Kasher that


It always pays to ask. Our counters were also formica, we asked a leading posek in our community and were told we were allowed to kasher many things we never imagined that we could.

we did ask! and I am sure different rabbonim pasken differently. we were told absolutely not, the only counters that could be kashered are granite, and even with that, the "seams" that hold the slabs together can be problematic (ours were not since the previous fam kept kosher, even if, acc to our Rov and acc to them, their minhagim and standards were different)
sky wrote:

But being that you paid 250 more - that is slightly less then we paid for our entire house and we couldn't have afforded more at that time.

haha! houses in our city are expensive! the 3 bedroom was 550 (they accepted our offer of 550 I should say, it was really 589). the house we ended up buying was 799.

sky wrote:


Plus our property taxes are crazy (they are equal to 1/3 of our monthly morgage payment), had we bought a bigger house, for more money it would be even more. It really depends how much your spending on the house to begin with, and how taxes work in your area.

in some areas this is a huge cost. where I live, property taxes are notoriously low. I dont (obviously) care about school districts, so didnt matter one bit to me. diff in property taxes on a 500K house and a 1.5 M house could be 2-3000 dollars around here, nothing that major when looking at the MILLION dollar diff in price!

sky wrote:


You realize your morgage is 500 more a month and taxes 100 more a month. I'm guessing your home insurance is also more $$ a month. Some people just don't have an additional 600 + a month over their original purchase budget. That is a lot of money.

yes I realize that. it was tighter like I said - less going into savings, but we were not dipping INTO savings.
ins was not too much more. some of that might have been that we would have never installed a home alarm system, but the 5 br house came with an alarm from ADT, so since they spent so much $ wiring the house with an alarm, we pay to keep it alarmed. that lowed insurance.

sky wrote:


I'd rather own a house, then have the house own us.

amen to that!
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msctwg




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Jan 06 2010, 8:51 am
I think that if you go w/ logic it makes sense to take the smaller one. However if you go w/your heart, which it sounds like that is what you want...then go for the bigger one and hashem will take care of filling it for you. I think that it is like a shiduch. sometimes a house can come along and it will be fine...no stars, no sparks, and then another house can come along and you know that this is it.
whatever you choose you should be shalem with it.
kol tov and b'hatzlacha!
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Marion




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Jan 12 2010, 8:57 am
We bought the bigger house when we made the decision. For a lot of reasons:

1. We were going to have a 30 year mortgage. I wanted a house that I'd still be living in when I paid the mortgage off.

2. The bedrooms were bigger. Which meant we could put more than one child in each room. Which ultimately meant we'd need fewer rooms.

3. We needed a guestroom. Not even because we like to have overnight Shabbat guests, but because if my parents or sisters (or whoever) come for 3 weeks from chu"l I don't expect them to pay for 3 weeks in a hotel. When my mom came after DS#1 was born she shared THE spare room with him. That wouldn't have worked if both my parents had come. And you can't give a married couple sheets and say "here you go, there are 2 couches" in the living room.

4. We moved to a place where the taxes were lower...so our property tax didn't change, even though we got double the space.

5. For now, our mortgage payments (which were a real stretch at the beginning) are STILL cheaper than the rent we were paying before. (At the time we bought my ILs were paying our rent...they have never made a mortgage payment on our behalf. So somehow, we manage.)
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Butterscoth




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Jan 13 2010, 3:36 pm
I would live within your means....It's not good to get into the habit of going into debt
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