Yes, people, writer’s
block is still going strong. I need a lap-top!!!! It was just perfect
sitting on our living room couch with the perfect backdrop of TV or
music and writing, drifting off, thinking, and returning to the post.
Now, it’s more like sitting
at the desk, the hubbie’s creative chaos all around, the chair too low
for me to type comfortably, it just doesn’t feel RIGHT..
Anyways, a little update is in order I think. Richard and I have
decided – rather spontaneously – to build a house. We knew we wanted to
buy a house within the next three to five years; I had made an
appointment with my bank’s mortgage adviser to find
out just how much house we might afford. The feedback was quite positive
and at that time I accidentally stumbled across that offer that meet
our dreams almost down to “i”. At the initial appointment with the
developer we found that this was not a building
ready to buy but that we would have to build ourselves – ooops! But
after some more research on local builders and our options we learned,
that it would not be as bad as “building” sounds to me but even has a
few advantages over buying a house outright:
+ Purchase costs: The property sales tax and notary tax are
measured on the sales value of the property only; savings about 85% of
the sales-related tax.
+ Custom building: we are still having quite some influence on the
final floor plan and can include our own ideas. If we had bought a
finished house, we might have had to spend quite a sum to adjust it to
our ideas.
+ Mortgage advantage: in Germany, the government is giving out
ridiculously cheap loans for building a new house and building a house
that meets certain energy-efficiency standards.
+ Realtor fees: since we are buying the property directly from the
developer and order the house from the building company we save the cost
of a buyer’s and seller’s agent, which again could be up to 7% of the
total house price.
However, we also had to take a couple of disadvantages of building into consideration:
- Time: If we had bought a home, we could have simply done the
necessary renovations and moved in, which should have not taken longer
than a month; building a home we hope to be able to move in August or
September of next year.
- Cost: Buying a house I would expect to pay both rent and mortgage
for one month. Building, the mortgage will start to accrue over a
period of about 9 months, and since we will have to do the flooring and
painting the walls by ourselves, we expect to
pay the full amount of both mortgage and rent for 2 months. However, the
savings on purchase-related cost will more than make up for the extra
cost accruing in the building process. I calculated that we would have
to pay both the full mortgage rate and rent
for about 12 months to match the savings from sales and notary tax
alone, realtors not taken into consideration.
Since we are under no pressure to move quickly and have the income
to float the extra monthly cost for a while we decided that this way
would be the right one for us. When we had an appointment with a builder
we decided on a 3-story townhome. At the current
stage, we are proud owners of a little slice of land and have just
signed our first loan and the building contract for the house. I will
keep you updated on news regarding the progress. Building will not start
until March of next year at the earliest and believe
it or not, I am already trying to decide on room themes for the girls.
Yes, I am officially excited to be a home owner by this time next year!
No comments:
Post a Comment