DH and I have been talking about selling our house and moving. Our house is way bigger than we need (2400 sqft, 4 bed, 1.75 bath for 2 people with no plans for kids) and it's 35 miles away from our jobs which are ~6 miles apart. An option has fallen into our laps that we're considering. It's 2 miles from my job and less than 10 from DH's.
Current House:
Needs something done with the floors. There's carpet over hardwood in the living room and 2 upstairs bedrooms and fake hardwood over real hardwood in the kitchen/dining area. The carpet in 1 bedroom and the living room NEEDS to go. We've seen the hardwood underneath the 2 bedrooms and it's not in great shape but I think it can be refinished for a "distressed" look that will actually look pretty good. We're not positive about how it looks under the living room or kitchen. Fake hardwood is not held down in away way as far as we can tell. I was able to get my fingers underneath when we pulled carpet out of one room and pull up and you could see it lift up three feet out. Still DH is wary about pulling up the fake hardwood in case the real stuff is too damaged. But the fake stuff clashes horribly with the real stuff so I'd either want to re-carpet the bedroom and living room or go back to all the original hardwood.
Would you take the chance and pull it all up and try to refinish or just put new carpet in the two rooms?New House:
Pros
- Very close to our jobs
- Big backyard for our 2 big dogs
- We know the owner and they're cutting us a deal on the house
- Not only that but they've offered to help with repairs at cost of materials because the husband likes doing that stuff. Bonus is that we get to learn since we know very little about home repairs
- Newer roof
- If we buy this and sell our current house we can max out all of our retirement accounts and be able to retire in 7 years
Cons:
- It's not in quite the area I was hoping to be though DH seems excited about it
- Just as big as our current house and older (1950's vs 1920's).
- TINY one car garage. Ideally we'd like an oversized 2 car. There's room to build a bigger one if we decide to but I have no idea what that would cost
- We haven't looked at it yet but the owner says it could really use a new kitchen and bathroom (keep in mind they've offered to help with repairs and since they have rentals they have contacts with contractors). Also sounds like a similar problem with the floors as our current house. We're going to look next week...
- We can't sell our current house until we're out of it because of the dogs so we'd have 2 mortgages at once. The town our house is in has a very slow market, our house was for sale for a year before we bought it in 2008 and a neighbors house took 2.5 years to sell even though they lowered the price by 25%, another neighbors house took 6 months. We can afford the two mortgages but we may have to cut back on retirement savings to pay for repairs and definitely won't be getting ahead on student loans
New house would most likely not be our retirement house since we want to live way out in the country, possibly back home near our parents. So we'd be planning on selling it again in 7 years or so.
Numbers: Current house appraised at $136k in 2012, local market has stayed pretty steady since then. Current mortgage $120k, $1375/month on 15 year loan. New house $90k, payment somewhere around $6-700/month on a 30 year loan (just until we sell the current, then we'd refi). Gross income $90k/year, net income about $1100/week (after taxes, insurance, and retirement savings, can raise this by about $450/month by suspending retirement savings if needed). Other debt, ~$750/month between my car and our student loans, all very low interest rate
What do you think about this possibility?