I am college graduate student in my last year of my Master's degree, and I will be pursuing a PhD that will take me 4 - 6 years to complete. I will most likely be remaining at my current university to do so, and I am considering long term housing options. Currently, My wife and I are renting a house for $700 a month ($900 after utilities) and our income is such that we essentially have the same amount of money coming in as we have going out, so we are not currently building up any savings.
I live in a city with a stagnate housing market, meaning that house prices are very low, and sales take a long time, so many people are getting desperate to get rid of their houses. I just started looking into HUD owned homes:
http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/housing/sfh/reo/reobuyfaq, and I was hoping to get some feedback from the MMM community on this subject.
In my area, there seems to be a decent number of these homes selling for $20K - $30K which is the equivalent of about 3-4 years of rent payments in our current house. I'm sure most of them need some fixing up, but even factoring that in it seems like this might be a good deal for us.
Does anyone here have experience or knowledge of this process? How easy is it to go through something like this?
Our income is relatively low right now, but we have managed to save about $4,000 over the last two years, and with help from our families we could afford the down payment on some of these lower costs houses. Even with a 15 year mortgage on many of these, payments would still only be about 1/3 of our current rent.
