Buying a home was a risk in plenty of other ways, too. After the stock market collapsed, nobody knew when or how things would get better, and most people weren’t buying homes even though prices had fallen sharply and interest rates were about as low as they’d ever been.
Looking back, if it hadn’t been for those conditions, I would have had to abandon my dream of becoming a homeowner. But because that dream was more important to me than the risk, I ended up with a fixer-upper row house from the late 1800s in a middle-income neighborhood just 5 miles outside of Manhattan—where my parents were still renting their apartment.
And I’ve been obsessed with real estate ever since, both a beneficiary of and a hostage to that obsession. I’m in a constant cycle of buying, fixing, refinancing, and selling—then moving again. On Zillow, the real estate listings website, I have hundreds of homes saved, in 11 different states. (These are not mansions, but modest homes with some element of charm that I could actually see myself living in.) My real estate agent, Kathy, and her husband have attended my son’s birthday parties, and she’ll periodically text or email me a listing in an adjacent town, even though I have no intention of moving. She knows that for the right house, it’s always on the table.
The current global economic uncertainty is hard to predict. Equally challenging is guessing where the housing market might go.
What I can tell you from experience is that if you’re thinking of buying a home for the first time, and you have some means to do so, there are opportunities that wouldn’t have been there even a few months ago. And there may be more in the future. Some real estate agents have the same view. “If you have the job and income security, there could be real opportunities coming for a first-time buyer,” says Stacy Francis, a certified financial planner in Manhattan. But she recommends a cautious approach, and suggests an emergency fund of 6 to 12 months’ living expenses in the bank before you buy. “I know that sounds like a really ideal scenario, and it is, but now is not the time to be stretched for cash.”
Here are lessons I’ve learned over a decade of home buying on a shoestring budget, tempered with insight from real estate agents, mortgage brokers, housing market analysts, and other experts I spoke with to help you avoid some of my mistakes (one involving a rather unfriendly pit bull) in your own search for your first home.
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