How to Find the Perfect Home: The Four C's

Money magazine has an excellent resource on how to find the perfect home. Here's a summary of the piece's philosophy:

[The perfect home] isn't the one that has everything. It's the one with more of what you want and less of what you don't. This system can guide you to it.

Their "system" boils down to focusing on what they call the four C's which are as follows:

• Cost
• Condition
• Capacity
• Convenience

Since I'm in the market for a new place, I was especially interested in their thoughts. And upon reading them (and after looking at a ton of homes the past few months), I can tell you that they have some good ideas. As such, I'll be focusing on one of the four C's over each of the next few days. Today, we'll start with cost. Here's what they recommend to find the perfect home you can afford:

I see a lot of buyers make a basic mistake: When deciding if a particular house fits their budget, they look only at listed price and their probable mortgage payments. But to make an honest comparison of the houses on your list, you must consider all the costs you'll be facing. In addition to mortgage payments, there are maintenance costs, property taxes and homeowners association fees, utilities and insurance.

Ah, yes. The mortgage is only the beginning (as any homeowner can tell you.) In addition to the costs they note above, you may need to add in some money (hopefully a one-time expense) to get the house in the shape you want it in. For instance, when we bought our last home, we factored in costs to re-do the paint and carpet in the entire place when we made our bid. It changed the entire appearance of the house and made it the home that we've now enjoyed for almost eight years.

A couple other tips from the piece also include being sure to budget for landscaping costs and for rising property taxes.

Click here to read part 2 of this series.

Comments

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Rising property taxes? Homeowners don't appreciate how good they have it in this country. Rising property taxes? In California and Michigan, that's for OTHER people to worry about.