Buying or Renting a House?

Question

My husband and I are having a disagreement on whether or not to buy a home once we PCS next month. We’ve lived overseas for over 4 years, in basically an apartment style home, and are expecting our second child in a few months. Needless to say, I’m ready for a house with a yard for our boys to play in and have SPACE for our growing family. 
My husband wants to rent a place for a year, save, and buy a home later. However, I don’t like the houses on base, been told multiple times to avoid living near this base, and renting a house that we actually like would cost more than way more than the BAH. He hasn’t officially said anything, but I think he wants to stay on base just because it’s more convenient. 
I wanted to move to a bigger place while we we stationed here, and my husband was very content on staying and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of moving, so I don’t want to be stuck in another place I don’t like purely for convenience. I honestly don’t trust that he’ll follow through buying a house in a year…
We’ve never bought a house before, and I can’t lie, I don’t know much about the house marketing or even getting a VA loan. So I’m hoping anyone would have some helpful information or feedback. I just want to have a place I feel good calling home and feel safe raising my babies.

Answer

I would say it really comes down to finances. Start figuring out what your budget can be for a home. Think about if you can afford things like an HOA? etc. Look up what houses you like in your budget and compare it to what houses like that are for rent. If it’s the same you might as well own a home.

Answer

Definitely depends on finances, and depending on where you are stationed the houses on base aren’t too bad. We are/were in the same boat. We just got to our new duty station with plans to buy before we got here. (Never buy without viewing first). When we came to see the house that we already put an offer on as well as paid our down payment for. We hated everything about it, thus begun the long and drawn out process of trying to back out and being told the seller and his company were going to sue us etc. So once that was squared away we decided to rent for a year and then half way through we’ll start looking to buy again. In the meantime we are saving our money because some buyers want a down payment which is about 10% of the selling price. With the VA home loan most times you can get out it but every seller has the right to refuse. You’ll also need what our realtor called escrow money.Most call it earnest money and that sits in an account to cover miscellaneous fees we had to pay $2500. With the VA loan I believe you have to live in the home for a year before you can resale. 
What I will say is buying is a great option and most service members don’t think about it because they’re constantly moving around. However, when it’s time to get out where are you going to go! My step dad was in the service and before he retired they required him and everyone else retiring to take a finance class. There were about 15 retiring and only him and 1 other had a home to go to when they got out. Everyone else said they were going to stay with family or friends until they figured it out. 
You can buy now and when you PCS again hire a company to rent out your home. Let someone else pay your mortgage while you’re away and then you can move back into your home when ever y’all are done.

Answer

We are currently in this situation, we’ve are moving back to the mainland from being away for 7 years. We are buying a house, but the only way we can afford one was to sell our other property. The interest rates on houses are extremely high right now, BAH isn’t going to cover mortgage, unless you budget extremely well & work a second job. You can find a fixer upper but it’s going to be. Rough fixer upper.

Answer

Talk to a lender, explain to them where you’re at and what options you’re considering. They will let you know if there are any loan products to benefit service members or any down payment assistance programs and also be able to give you an idea of whether or not you would qualify for a loan usually without doing a hard credit pull. Renting is not going to “save” you any money. You’ll most likely pay more in rent than you would for a mortgage payment. I’ve worked in property management and real estate for over a decade. Rates are historically lower than they have been over the past 50 years. Sure they’re not as low as they were 3 years ago but they are by no means high. Ask some of your older family members what interest rate they got when the bought their homes. There is no guarantee rates will go down :/ a lot of my clients are telling me this and unfortunately this mindset can make it harder to for home buyers everyone will wait for rates to drop a half percent or some other event and then everyone who was waiting is now looking to buy. There are a tons of buyers out there and not always a ton of sellers. Good luck! ❤️❤️

Answer

Interest rates are pretty high right now, so your mortgage payment will be high. Unless there is a military benefit for housing I don’t know about.

Buying or Renting a House?

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