5 Homeownership Tips You Might Not Have Known | Owning your own home provides flexibility and freedom unlike anything a renter can enjoy. In addition, lenders make for great partners when approaching a home buying opportunity as a borrower. Renting offers rapid mobility for those living within temporary circumstances: College students, early career professionals, or wage earners looking to break into full-time employment. Yet renting can’t guarantee much of anything beyond this unique ability to pack up and move whenever the winds take you on to something new.
The life of a homeowner, on the other hand, offers access to wealth generating asset growth, as well as a free canvas upon which you can filter out the noise and create your own unique living space that’s perfectly tailored to your family’s needs or hobbies. You can change paint colors, add in a home theater with hard wired audio and video controls, or tear out a kitchen or bathroom and start from scratch on a custom rebuild. Anything is possible when you own your home, but life as an owner and borrower isn’t always easy. In addition to mortgage insurance for those with less than the standard 20 percent down payment, owners must deal with all the issues in the home on their own, from pollen and tree canopy issues to appliance repair and cash flow considerations.
The stressors felt by a homeowner are a lot like those of a small business manager. You will often have to learn on the job, just as you must learn what to do if you injure yourself in your restaurant’s kitchen, and borrowers have to manage a million different skills at once in their homes.
With these five great tips, making the experience of being a homeowner more enjoyable can be a lot more fun and easily achieved, too.
- Mortgage payments aren’t equal to rent payments.
As a homeowner, planning vacations is a somewhat different concept. Renters must consider the sunk cost of leaving their rented and uninhabited space while they’re away for a long weekend, or even the summer, for those in university programs and a year-long lease. Homeowners face a different challenge when it comes to leaving the house behind.
Your monthly payments on the mortgage loan aren’t going into the pocket of a real estate property owner. Instead, you are repaying a debt on the property that you own. This means that each monthly payment that you make to your lender goes directly toward chipping away at the ownership stake that you haven’t yet claimed as your own.
With each monthly payment you get a little closer to total ownership over the property. Eking out a few extra percentage points of ownership each month may seem like a long and virtually pointless slog while writing out many of these checks, yet the larger your stake the greater your long term financial freedom becomes. This is why many homeowners choose to seek out private mortgage lenders rather than the big financial institutions for the flexibility in a home equity line of credit (HELOC) or refinancing opportunities down the line that allow you to put you equity in the home to work for you.
- Plan family vacations with your unique needs in mind.
Planning a vacation is intimately tied into the repayment obligation that you’ve taken on. This debt interacts with your finances differently than a rent check might, but it still takes away from your overall spending power each month. Planning vacations as your family grows and changes is therefore a large task that requires the best baby stroller (whether a Chicco, Graco, or Doona) and car seat on the market and many other additions. Families often choose to make road trips a key feature in their holiday schedule because of these additional pieces of equipment that must travel with them.
Road trips are a great way to pack the lightweight stroller that your child needs while still getting away from your typical routine and making the most of any time off that you’ve accrued. This is particularly important during the pandemic time. Working from home has placed the stroller, high chair, and newborns and toddlers directly into conflict with organized workspaces, blurring the home-life balance in a novel and frustrating new way. Strollers are particularly interesting for their bulkiness and necessity.
Making sure that you’ve bought the perfect travel-friendly lightweight stroller for your newborn or toddler (with key features like a smooth ride, storage basket, cup holder, wheel suspension, brake, and easy to use handlebar for maneuverability) is the best way to maximize enjoyment during vacation time away from the home and routine.
- Conduct routine maintenance early and often.
Maintenance is crucial to keeping a highly functioning home. This takes many forms, from filter replacements that boost air quality to appliance repair for greater efficiency. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on system issues as well over the long term. By inspecting your roof, floors, and windows on a quarterly or yearly basis, for instance, you will know when a hazard begins to present itself rather than having to guess when you inevitably spot something that seems potentially out of the ordinary.
Adding an air purifier for home is a great way to immediately boost your home’s efficiency and the air quality within your home. With Covid-19 continuing to threaten the common spaces that we must traverse in order to work, shop for groceries, and our other necessities, air quality at home is something that can be controlled and perfected. A durable air purifier is a great option for those hoping to reduce allergens in the home, and allergy-related reactions more generally. The best air purifiers often have many reviews online and feature high quality filters for removing airborne particles from your home or office space. For high quality air filtration, you can’t beat an air purifier with adjustable fan speeds and easy filter replacement mechanisms.
- Utilize quality of life updates for greater peace of mind.
Quality of life updates can double or even triple your home’s value over time. This is why many home flippers buy properties out of foreclosure and pump updates into the space with the help of a professional contractor like CMK Construction Inc. Replacing kitchen countertops or cabinets is often a great start for the owner looking to make a serious change to the home’s energy. Also, a warranty policy is a great way to ensure that your home is always in top condition. Getting a technician out to fix any problems that occur in the sink, grease trap, or air conditioning and air purifier systems is a breeze with a home warranty.
- Remember that your home is an investment as well as a place for relaxation.
Finally, it’s important to remember that your home is an investment. In the United States, people tend to move after about thirteen years in a property. Your home loan won’t be paid off during that time in all likelihood, so maximizing the value of your space in advance of any sale is often the recourse that buyers resort to when considering how to fund their next home purchase.
Remember that your home is a value asset that must be leveraged for greater capital mobility at some point in the future. Keeping up your maintenance routine is the best way to eliminate many of the common problems that a home might see, but nothing beats targeted upgrades and preventative repairs.
Make sure to always keep one eye on the future and your home will serve you well.
