"'Fezzik, are there rocks ahead?' 'If there are, we'll all be dead!'"
Move into an Apartment for 1-1.5 years
 |
| Source |
What a terrific question. Let me share the answer with you now.
Selling this house is probably not going to be the easiest thing we'll ever do. When we first started talking about building our dream house, the fear of finding ourselves with two mortgages hung over us, making the whole idea seem impossible. Not to mention that we need to save up for some kind of down payment for the new house. And as it is currently, we are sharing one of the two bedrooms we have with Bug. Bear has her own room, and that's not going to change. And if we found ourselves really stuck here, we could potentially make the family room a third bedroom. But we'd like to avoid all that.
So we decided to rent an apartment for a twelve to eighteen months. It's a great solution for several reasons:
- For about the same amount as our mortgage payment, we can rent a three-bedroom apartment with more square footage than our house. That means we may not need to even rent a storage facility for any of our stuff.
- In that cost, some utilities are included.
- The apartment we're looking at allows large dogs, so we don't have to make arrangements for our girl, or allow her to continue to destroy our yard. We'll just have to walk her more often and take her to the bark park for exercise.
- The apartment we're looking at has a month-by-month leasing option after the first year. That means that we can spend a year saving up for the dream house (with no toxic debt sucking up our money!) and then build the house with the option to move out of the apartment as soon as the house is ready.
I fully realize that it's different for you and most people that have a family, but apartment living is the only way to go for me. Being single with no kids (other than Oscar), I honestly feel like more of my take-home pay is MINE to do with as I want. If most of my appliances break, the fix is covered via a phone call to maintenance. There are two dog parks in my neighborhood. At my particular location, I am 10 minutes or less from essentials (grocery, entertainment, gas), including the city itself. I'm 25 minutes from work, and 35 from the airport.
ReplyDeleteAgreed! There's a weird idea that once you've owned a home you can't go back to renting, but last time I checked, this is America and you can do whatever the hell you want. There's a big trend right now towards renting over owning, and while I have no intention of walking away from our plans to build our dream house, I get the appeal.
ReplyDeleteWe will be renters after we sell, too, and probably for a good long while because the first several years of academia typically mean a lot of moving around. No way I'm buying until Kurt actually MAKES tenure. And that could be a very long time. I'm honestly just fine with this (in theory). We're professional renters after doing it for so long before we bought the house, so we are pretty discriminating about landlords and so on. I would love to rent a cute little house on a campus somewhere and sock away money for someday. The expenses just never freaking end when it comes to home ownership. I'm honestly looking forward to the break! I think your plan makes complete sense because you'll be able to firmly have your feet planted before you make the big jump.
ReplyDelete