Related Articles:
Home - Additional Articles
My Short Sale Experience
New Construction Condo Experience
The Appraisal That Saved Us Thousands
We Almost Rushed Into Buying The Wrong House
Trying To Buy A House From A Difficult Seller
I Am Now A Homeowner
My Homeownership Update

Hey Everyone! How's it going? I can't believe it, it's been one full year since my last article on Save For House (my article about unexpected homeownership expenses). Equally crazy, I've now been a homeowner for nearly two full years! My wife and I spent many long years saving up our down payment and purchased our dream condo about two years ago. It has been great! I can't say enough about homeownership. Moreover, I can't say enough about saving a large down payment so you're in great financial shape (patience is a true virtue when buying your first home). Today, I wanted to give you an update and share my overall strategy with homeownership. I sincerely thank you for your support, thanks so much for visiting Save For House!

Interior Design and Decoration Is So Much Fun

First and foremost, I have to say that the most fun of homeownership has been the design element! We have really had a blast decorating with custom furniture, artwork, and paint colors. Our condo is now truly ours. It's such a great feeling to come home, a feeling I never had when living in apartment homes. So, if you're currently saving your down payment, stay focused on the prize. Once you have your down payment and purchase your first place, you'll be able to go crazy designing it exactly how you want. Want to make this even easier? Save a little extra money so you have money left over for furniture (good quality furniture does not come cheap).

We're Paying A Little Extra On Our Mortgage Each Month

I'm a huge fan of financial freedom. What does financial freedom mean? It means I don't have to work anymore! More technically, it means I have more money coming in from passive income than my monthly expenses. What's my biggest monthly expense? The mortgage bill. As such, my wife and I are paying a little extra toward our equity each month. We're trying to make at least one extra mortgage payment per year. This alone will cut around 10 years off of our 30 year mortgage. As a side note, we went with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage (with no prepayment penalty). I highly recommend doing the same. After all, you want to "own" your home, right? Interest only loans do nothing to help you build up equity. The funny part of this all? The very money saving skills that helped us save up our down payment are now helping us save a little extra money and pay off our mortgage faster!

We're Already Saving For Our Next Down Payment

Our condo is beautiful, it's 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms. We have some great square footage and are set for now! However, as a family that has a lot of stuff, it's going to be tough if we have children (or even a dog for that matter!). As such, we're starting to save for our next down payment, a down payment on a single family home! Now, this isn't going to happen anytime soon. In fact, it's likely to be around five years before we buy our first house. However, as we both very well know from saving our first down payment, the process takes a lot of time. Unless we start saving now, we'll never have enough money to buy a house! It's all about determination and dedication.

You may be thinking, do we plan to sell our condo and then buy a house? Actually, probably not! I'm a huge fan of passive income! The real goal would be to rent out our condo and hopefully break even or maybe even make a profit by doing so! Once we have enough passive income, we won't have to work anymore!

I'm Working Hard On My Websites

Over the last year, I've been working really hard on my portfolio of websites. I own a good number of websites now and they have been very good to me. You may recall, I'm a huge fan of websites that drive passive income. It's been a very long road, but my websites are now driving some great supplemental income. I'm taking this passive income and am now leveraging it to pay a little extra towards our mortgage each month while saving up for our next down payment. So, there you have it! That's my last year in a nutshell. I sincerely thank you for supporting Save For House and wish you the absolute best of luck in saving your down payment and striving for homeownership!