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How your choices affect the cost of your new home. With all four children plus mom suffering from asthma and allergies, Paul and Cindy opted to invest $3,000 in a high-performance air filter and air purification system when building their new home. They feel it was...
How your choices affect the cost of your new home. “People don’t buy a new home because of the energy efficiency, though they’ll brag about that later,” according to home builder Hugh Fisher in Warwick, Rhode Island, referring to his net zero-energy ready homes at...
My daughter asked me to go car shopping with her. With two young boys (one that’s just 8 months old) she was ready for an SUV with three rows of seating. Her preferences had a major impact on the vehicle’s price. First, the middle seats had to be captain’s chairs....
How your choices affect the cost of your new home. While a 2,000 square foot home selling for $350,000 works out to $175 per square foot, all square feet do not cost the same. For example, square feet in the kitchen are much pricier than square feet in bedrooms. Some...
How your choices affect the cost of your new home. What’s a “brake light home”? One that is so stunning, that brake lights come on as people slow down to take in its beauty while driving by! New homes of almost any size, at almost any price point, can exude curb...
Since 1980, the number of Americans living in multi-generational households has been on the rise to where today, one in five U.S. households have at least two adult generations in the home, and usually children, too. Younger adults find paying rent to their parents...
When looking at your new home investment, one of the considerations is future resale value. Buyer preferences change over time, and the farther out your time horizon, the less confident you can be in a design, amenity, or product’s future popularity. Americans live in...
Last time we looked at PITIU (Principle, Interest, Taxes, Insurance, and Utilities) as a truer definition of total monthly housing costs. But if you’re also considering a resale home, there are other costs that need to be figured in. Replacements. How would we expect...
Thinking about the cost of home ownership often resides in the “left brain,” which is associated with information, rational thinking, and analytics. Yet we feel other, very real costs, expressed in terms such as happiness/frustration, contentment/disappointment, or...
Principal + Interest + Taxes + Insurance (PITI) – that’s been the standard way of defining monthly housing cost and often been a factor in determining how large of a monthly mortgage payment you can afford. Today’s historically low mortgage interest rates in many...
