House Hunting

They say that moving/buying a house is stressful.  It's even more stressful when you are moving to another state, in a completely different part of the country. It's even more stressful when you are moving to one state and working in another. There are weird tax rules to know about.

For example, we will be paying 6.9% income tax in Delaware because that's where Dustin works (I'll wait while you go ahead and pick your jaws up off the floor...). Since we will be living in Pennsylvania we get a credit on our income taxes for that state (we don't have to pay twice), but we lose out big time by not getting to pay PA's roughly 3% income tax (ouch). On top of that, PA doesn't let you take a tax deduction on your 401K contributions. Well isn't that nice of them! We will then owe PA for the taxes we didn't pay in DE for that contribution (ouch). You had better believe that I won't be buying one single thing in the state of PA; I'll be crossing the state line and buying all my goods in the sales-tax-free state of Delaware. (To be fair, PA doesn't have sales taxes on clothing/shoes.)

What have we learned on our home search so far?

1) Trulia is an amazing website for keeping track of homes and price changes. Dustin gets alerts sent to him any time a home on our list goes up or down in price. It's been very helpful.

2) Zillow is another good website that gives you a "Zestimate" for each home which is totally based on market conditions and doesn't factor in the asking price. Of the homes we are looking at, some houses has asking prices of up to $20K higher than the "Zestimate", but only one home had a price lower. Not sure how helpful it will be when it comes to negotiating on a home, but it's good to get as much info as you can.

3) Know the max amount you can afford/are willing to pay before even going. Inevitably, you're going to like the most expensive house the most. So glad we never got sucked into this. We are only seeing homes we can afford. I'm also really glad that we have an excellent Realtor who listened to what we wanted to see and never showed us homes that were over our price range.

4) Great Schools is another website that is super important. Gives you ratings, parent/teacher comments, and test score information for schools in whatever area you want. The house we originally wanted got dropped to the very bottom of our list because the schools just aren't where we want them to be. For us, we'd rather pay for a more expensive house in a better school district than pay oodles of money to send three kids to private school.

5) Pay attention to interest rate forecasts. Dustin has been following these like a hawk for the past three months. Thankfully, when we are looking to close on our home interest rates will be lower than what they were projected a few months ago. This might make a difference as to when you want to close on your home or lock in your interest rate with the lender. It can save hundreds of dollars on your mortgage payment. 

We are going back to DE/PA on Thursday to do a final look at houses (we're seeing 11 homes in one day!). We'll be placing an offer on Friday and doing negotiations on Saturday. It's going to be a crazy-busy weekend. That's another thing about buying a house far away -- you can't just go house hunting as many times as you want. You have to be very prepared. This will be our second and final trip. The next time we go to DE/PA it will be with a U-Haul truck full of our junk.

So, since we're new to this buying a house thing - what are we missing? Any other good websites?