What’s one piece of advice you would give aspiring homeowners?
Find ways to make your budget work for what you want to do. You don’t have to tackle everything at once. Yes, you might hate that bathroom, but make it a goal like, “ I’m going to save to make this purchase.” I really wanted House of Hackney wallpaper in the powder room, I was like “I want this to be my birthday gift.” You can pick and choose the little things. The point is, you’re doing you’re doing this for yourself. Make sure it’s something that you want that makes you happy, don’t try to do it to impress someone else. If you want to save money, you have to do it yourself. You have to assign a value to what you do or don’t want to do. There’s certain things even now where we’re like, “Well, we can do the drywall, but it’s so time consuming and messy.” So if I get a bid that’s below X number, it’s worth us paying them and having someone else do it. You have to weigh your costs.
What was one mistake you made during the home-buying process?
Not looking into all of the costs. We could have always spent more time looking at all the varying costs of building a home and external factors. It’s not just construction, it’s also land excavation, power, propane, all these things that are added costs that are necessary to have a livable home. We could have better accounted for it. We would have budgeted slightly differently had we truly had a full picture. Luckily we had savings and we phased things. It’s worth mentioning to do your research because there are a lot of financing options out there. It might take longer and there’s probably more paperwork involved. But you can afford to do it. Most people can afford to own a house. You just have to find your parameters and do your research.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about homeownership?
People think that you have to have a lot of money to buy a house, this especially applies to millennials or younger people living in metropolitan areas like New York and LA. If you really want to buy something, you have to look beyond your favorite neighborhood. Our apartment in Bay Ridge is literally the end of the R line. It’s a lovely homey neighborhood, but we sacrificed on proximity to Manhattan in order to be able to afford something. Yes, location is important, but we’ve got other things and our apartment is more affordable.
You don’t have to be rich to do this. There are plenty of financing options so make sure you look into those and do your research. You can leverage the money that you have to get these different types of loans. For us, it was a construction loan. We did a lot of work before the construction loan because you have to have a lot of documentation and proof of concept. I would say a business loan and a construction loan are extremely similar.