Andrew Alpaugh Home Buying

Making your first offer on a home feels significant in a way that's hard to explain until you've done it. You've been looking at listings, doing walkthroughs, imagining furniture placement — and now you're about to write a number on a piece of paper that could define the next thirty years of your financial life. Most first-time buyers get told what to offer. Almost nobody gets told how to think about it. Here's what I've learned — and what I wish someone had explained to me plainly before I went through it. The List Price Is a Starting Position, Not a Verdict Sellers set list prices based on what they hope to get, what their agent suggests, and what comparable homes sold for — in that order. The list price is not a fact about what the home is worth. It is an opening position in a negotiation. This sounds obvious. It stops being obvious the moment you fall in love with a house and start rationalizing why asking price is actually fair. That's the mom...

The number on the listing sheet is not what buying a home costs you. This isn't a complaint — it's just reality, and it catches first-time buyers off guard more than almost anything else in the process. You budget for the down payment, you calculate your monthly payment, and then you get to closing and discover there's a list of additional costs that nobody handed you a flyer about. Here's what's actually on that list. Closing Costs (2–5% of the Loan Amount) Closing costs are the collection of fees paid at the time of closing to the various parties who made the transaction happen: the lender, the title company, the county recorder, the attorneys (depending on your state). In South Carolina and most states, buyers typically pay between 2 and 5 percent of the loan amount in closing costs. On a $300,000 home with a $240,000 loan, that's $4,800 to $12,000 — due at closing, in addition to your down payment. What's in there: Loan origination fee — ...