My husband and I plan on purchasing a new house next year. We’ve been putting it off for quite a while now, first because of pay cuts at our jobs and then because of our daughter entering kindergarten. Well, come January, we’ll know if she won the charter school lottery and we’ll finally be able to decide where we’re moving.
The big question we’ve been facing, besides where to live and what type of house to buy is whether we should get a 15-year or 30-year mortgage. Now, ideally, I’d like to have no mortgage but since paying 100% for a house or having a paid-for house given to us is close to impossible, we’ve been discussing what to do. We know that we’d like to have our house paid for as soon as possible, which means that we should go with the 15-year mortgage. And by using a mortgage interest calculator, it’s clear that we’d save a good amount on interest by going this route.
Then there’s the issue of the monthly payment. We really don’t want to have a higher payment than we have now but the houses that we’re looking at all cost more than our current house. We have some equity in our current house and we can use that, and we have some savings, but I’m not sure that it’s enough to bring the payment down to what we pay now. I guess we’ll have to do some serious looking, negotiating and compromising.
There are other mortgage options besides the traditional 15 and 30-year options, most of which I refuse to use (ARM, interest only) and after what’s happened in the housing market, I’m actually surprised still exist. We’ll have to be very savvy and ask a lot of questions so we don’t get screwed (which I’m hoping doesn’t happen since our debt to income ratio is quite good and we have excellent credit). I want a new house, but I don’t want one bad enough to have my finances wrecked or become house poor.
We’re not interested in converting our current house into a rental property nor or we interested in buying an investment property but should we ever get to that point, there is something called a buy to let mortgage that we can use and by using a buy to let mortgage calculator, we’d be able to determine what our payments would be. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll become real estate moguls and this might be our ticket to that.
Buying our first house was an enormous learning experience. But we knew it wasn’t going to be our permanent house. I need to take the mistakes we made last time, write them down and then make sure those don’t happen again!
This post was provided by Emortgage Calculator.
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