The one thing most of us would love is to find our forever home. Take a quick peek on Pinterest and you’ll find endless boards and pins from want-to-be homeowners daydreaming about their perfect property. As landmark life events go, getting your own place is undoubtedly one of the biggest.
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Advice for everyone
If you’ve ever bought a house, you’ll no doubt know just how stressful the whole thing can be. One of the most difficult things is knowing whether you’re doing the whole mortgage search right. Many people get home-buying advice from their parents, who learned what they know from their parents. But some parents will have rented all their lives – increasingly the case, with renter numbers going up – while others might not be able to get advice from their mum and dad for other reasons.
But if you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to buying a house, the whole process can feel completely alien and utterly overwhelming. Add on to that the cost of buying a home and you can see why it’s regularly seen as being one of the biggest and most demanding decisions of anyone’s life.
Fortunately and in line with so many of us heading online for the majority of the services we wish to access, expert mortgage advice can be found online to help those unsure to find their footing. If you’re new to the property scene, you may have found it can be hard to find an impartial mortgage broker, but now there’s Trussle. The free service uses algorithms to search mortgage providers, which might be reassuring for anyone looking for unbiased results.
First things for first-time buyers
So many people get super excited when buying a house, and who can blame them? Looking forward to having those keys in your hand can make you forget about everything else. However, there are a few things you’ll certainly want to keep right at the top of your priority list when it comes to buying your first pad.
First of all, make sure you get a thorough survey of the place done. To the untrained eye, it can seem as though everything is tickety-boo with a property, but those who specialise in assessing buildings will be able to give you the peace of mind you need to ensure what you’re buying is worth the investment. Nobody likes nasty surprises, after all.
A caveat to this is that with new-build properties, a survey shouldn’t really be necessary, and it’s not a legal requirement. However, you will want to get a 10-year guarantee from the builder, which itself largely does away with the need for a home buyer’s survey. Again, from experience, getting a snagging survey done is wise though — just to cover the small things (and all bases).
Another thing you’ll certainly want to have in place well ahead of time is the removal/moving van rental, if you need one. Figure out if you’ll be able to get everything moved across over the course of one weekend. If not, definitely consider booking some time off from work, as there’s nothing worse than dragging the whole process out over the course of several weeks. Also, if you can move during the week, that’s even better, as you usually get rental vans for a little cheaper around the midweek mark.
Oh, and you’ll want to make a list of all the essential items to have bought, ready for moving in. Fortunately, you can find a pretty comprehensive list here. Now all you have to do is get finding that forever home!
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