photo credit: TheTruthAbout…
This is the first article in a series about the process of buying and selling a home. Two years ago Mr. Boomer and I did something I would not advise my worst enemy to do … sell your home and buy the replacement at the same time. If it was such a bad experience why did we do it?
Advantages
The primary advantage of having two real estate transactions in process at once is that there is only one move. That meaves you only have to call the utilities one time, change the newspaper delivery once and notify your friends, family and all those magazine subscriptions of your new address once.
If you have school age kids you only change their school once if the move is far enough away. You save money by only hiring movers or if you do it yourself (which we did) rent the truck the one time.
The second reason (which may be the more important) is that you stay in the same market price-wise. In Southern California home prices were pretty volatile during our transaction time and the concern was that if we sold first and then looked to buy we’d be priced out of the market.
Yes we could have bought a more expensive home, but in order to take advantage of an oportunity to transfer our tax basis, our replacement home could not cost more than 5% over our selling price. (This is due to propositions 60 and 90.)
Disadvantages
Having two real estate transactions in progress at the same time is like having a stack of cards. A problem anyway along that stack could bring the entire thing tumbling down. And we did have times when the stack fell which I’ll go into more in future articles.Let me just say this process is not for the faint of heart.
Due to the stack of cards there can be an incredible amount of stress. If you already have more stress than you’d like in your life than I strongly recommend dealing with one home deal at a time.
Coming Up
Stay tuned for the rest of the series. Upcoming topics are:
1. Selling our Home
2. Buying a House
3. HOAs: Good or Bad?
Content © Bucksomeboomer 2009. All Rights Reserved.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 3 trackbacks }