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    The Millennial Homeowner: A Guide to Successfully Navigating Your First Home Purchase
    The Millennial Homeowner: A Guide to Successfully Navigating Your First Home Purchase
    The Millennial Homeowner: A Guide to Successfully Navigating Your First Home Purchase
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    The Millennial Homeowner: A Guide to Successfully Navigating Your First Home Purchase

    By Lauren Bowling

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    About this ebook

    In her debut book "The Millennial Homeowner," personal finance blogger Lauren Bowling provides a wealth of home buying tips and money management lessons to help millennials redefine their relationship with money. Written in Lauren’s warm, funny, and easy-to-understand voice, this book helps millennial homebuyers financially prepare for the biggest purchase of their lifetime. By breaking down complex financial concepts into clear, manageable tools, Lauren has written the ultimate resource to help millennials navigate the overwhelming process of purchasing and maintaining their first home.

    Inside "The Millennial Homeowner" you will learn:
    • How to financially prepare for homeownership
    • Practical tips to begin searching for your first home
    • How to determine affordability and avoid overspending
    • Specific items to look for during a home inspection
    • What to expect when you’re under contract
    • Creative ideas to renovate and add value to your home

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoventry House Publishing
    Release dateDec 8, 2016
    The Millennial Homeowner: A Guide to Successfully Navigating Your First Home Purchase
    Author

    Lauren Bowling

    Lauren Bowling is the award-winning blogger and editor behind FinancialBestLife.com (formerly L Bee and the Money Tree). Blogging since 2012, Lauren is now a recognized thought leader on millennial finance and first-time homeownership. Her expertise has been featured in the pages of Redbook and Woman’s Day magazines and on leading online financial news sites including Forbes, The Huffington Post, CNNMoney, and U.S. News and World Report. Lauren happily resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

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      Book preview

      The Millennial Homeowner - Lauren Bowling

      Contents

      Introduction

      1 - Am I Really Ready to Own?

      2 - Financially Preparing for Homeownership

      3 - Getting Started With Your Home Search

      4 - When You Are Under Contract

      5 - The Many Surprises of Homeownership

      6 - If You Want to Renovate

      Conclusion

      About the Author

      Introduction

      If you’re a long-time reader of my blog, L Bee and the Money Tree, then you know the basic gist of my homeownership story: I bought my first home at age twenty-six, making less than $40,000 dollars per year, and I only paid $1,800 at closing. (More on how I swung that later.)

      It was 2013 when I started looking for my first home, and I was home shopping with my then fiancé. We kept the transaction financially separate—I was on the mortgage, but he had final input on what we bought, which ended up being a foreclosure and complete gut job. He wanted a ton of space, and since I’m a money nerd, I wanted to grow my money via the equity in the home. I was excited about becoming a homeowner, but only reluctantly on board with the property we chose.

      Everyone’s homebuying journey is different, but mine was particularly terrible. What I didn’t expect was how difficult and stressful every aspect of the home buying process would be. Part of it was my own naiveté and biting off more than I could chew by purchasing a fixer-upper, but each step, from finding an agent to getting under contract, seemed fraught with difficulties.

      Three months after we closed on our home, I ended up losing thousands of dollars and draining my savings to finish a renovation project because my contractor was doing cheap work and skimming off the top. You’d think as a personal finance blogger I would have known better, but just like with personal finance, school doesn’t have a class on how to become a knowledgeable homeowner.

      The one thing missing from my story was a trusted resource in the form of someone who had been through the process before. My parents were around, but they’d bought a home decades earlier, and their information and advice were a little outdated in the digital age. I didn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to turn to for advice on what I should do when buying a home, from preparing for it financially, to getting through closing, to finally moving into the home itself.

      So, why attempt homeownership? After all, don’t hip and trendy millennials thrive on being unencumbered and without responsibility?

      Well, yes. But even I can admit there was a massive part of me that wanted to own something, to prove that I was capable, sturdy, and smart—the type of person who was responsible and mature enough to own a home. Even at twenty-six, I wanted my own piece of the American Dream: The man, the house, the dog, and the job.

      Despite the difficulty, and the thousands of dollars in mistakes that I made along the way, owning a home has turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made for myself. It’s allowed me to stabilize my wealth, grow my savings, make passive income from renters, and keep my living expenses low enough to leave my full-time job and pursue my dreams. Those are just the tangible benefits. I’ve also learned some sweet DIY skills, and pushed myself further both emotionally and physically than I ever thought possible.

      But even if you want to buy, many millennials are having a difficult time making their dreams of homeownership a reality.

      Why Millennials Aren’t Buying Homes

      Millennial. Millennial. Millennial. It rolls around in the mouth, doesn’t it? One could argue that it is one of the buzziest buzzwords of the last five years. Pick up any print publication or browse a popular news site on any particular day and you’ll find at least one article about millennials: How we’re the reason workplaces are changing; how we’re the most financially savvy generation since the recession, but also the most behind when it comes to earnings, savings, and retirement; and, oh yeah, how we’re not buying homes.

      Yet for all the positive and negative buzz about millennials, companies are desperately trying to figure out how to market to us. They’re building products and brands with social awareness in mind, and writing scores of literature about how to best manage millennials in the workplace. They do this because we’re a massive section of the population. In fact, a White House Council of Economic Advisers study reports that over one-third of the population are millennials. Eventually, we’ll emerge from our perceived extended adolescence into true adulthood. We’ll start running companies, redefining the way global economies work, and, finally, buying real estate.

      But the reason millennials haven’t purchased homes or stepped in to save the flagging economy with our shopping habits and investment accounts is because, at first, we couldn’t—47% of millennials have college degrees, more than any other generation in history, but with this highly educated population comes nearly $1 trillion in student loan debt. Add the loan burden to the economic hardship faced by millennials who graduated college during the recession years, and you have a generation stunted by unemployment. Collectively we’ve lost millions of salary dollars during those high-earning pre-children years.

      With that kind of math, it’s no surprise that millennials are delaying economic milestones like homeownership, marriage, and yes, even children.

      This information isn’t much of a surprise to anyone, as millennial trends have been well covered in the news. What is surprising to learn, however, is despite the buzz, a large knowledge gap still exists, particularly when it comes to reaching those economic milestones previously mentioned. I’m talking specifically about making the biggest—and potentially most expensive—purchase of your lifetime: A home to call your own.

      ………………………………………..

      Buying a house today has completely different implications than it did even ten years ago,

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