First time home buying tips everyone should know
Just buying a home for the first time is scary enough. Add on top of that all the things you need to know and things you should and shouldn’t do, and people freak out. Let’s keep it simple! Here are 7 first-time home buying tips you need to know.
7 home buying tips with William S. Matthews:
Home buying tips for queer people (allies)
Are you buying real estate in 2021?
On this episode of Queer Money®, we’re visited again by William S. Matthews, a real estate broker, buyer, and investor, about home buying tips, whom you may remember from Queer Money® episode 9, ‘Paying for a Gay Wedding.’
With William, we discuss seven tips first-time home buyers should consider before buying their first home. William stresses, twice, that home buyers should never – never ever – shackle themselves with ‘golden handcuffs’.
That’s what we call being house-poor and avoiding being house poor (and paying off our $51,000 in credit card debt), has made all the difference in our financial situation. It’s taken us from living in a hole physically and financially to having $1 million in savings and on track to having $2.5 million by the time we retire.
Plus, avoiding being house-poor has let us travel the world on cash (well, on credit cards to get travel rewards that are paid off before the due date to avoid high-interest credit card debt). That’s taken us to Mexico several times, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Ireland, England, Spain, France, and all over the U.S. of A.
And we’ll be real, most people would never consider this, and most real estate agents won’t suggest it – ours didn’t.
What we did that helped so incredibly much was buy a home (a condo to be clear) was buy a condo that was on one and a half times our combined household income. That means we had a significant amount of purchasing power after we pay our housing expenses (mortgage, HOA, maintenance).
That meant more money for travel. More money for investing. More for whatever we wanted or needed.
That was liberating! And that’s aided in our financial security today and through retirement. We share why we did that and more on how that’s helped us on this episode of Queer Money® and thisQueer Money Follow-Up.
Because we’re a gaggle of gay men on a queer podcast, we discussed on Queer Money® episode 12 home buying tips for LGBTQ people, including safety considerations and how the federal Fair Housing Act doesn’t specifically protect queer people.
William shares home buying tips for buying into safe neighborhoods.
We revisit the idea of queer people living in second and third-tier cities (Atlanta, Salt Lake, Austin) over first-tier cities (LA, NYC, Chicago) because of the long-term financial benefits. For more info on gay-friendly second and third-tier cities, see one of our most popular articles here.
See our recap of this episode of Queer Money® here:
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✅ Subscribe to the Queer Money® podcast here @ QueerMoneyPodcast
✅ Hear the original Queer Money® episode @ 7 Home Buying Tips with William S. Matthews
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✅ Email us with questions @ [email protected]
We’re David and John Auten-Schneider, the Debt Free Guys (www.debtfreeguys.com) and hosts of the Queer Money® podcast. We help queer people (and allies) live fabulously not fabulously broke by helping them 1) pay off credit card debt, 2) become part- or full-time entrepreneurs and 3) save and invest for retirement.