Even though you may not plan to sell your own home, there are times when it becomes inevitable. In fact, people who live their entire life in one home are quite rare. Selling a home may seem less complicated than buying one, but selling a home can be stressful and time-consuming if you don’t do it properly. When the word goes out that you are planning to sell your home, the first people to be attracted to you will be the real estate agents in the area. On the other hand, the IRS and state authorities might be waiting to take a chunk of your profits once you complete the sale. That’s why you need to understand tax laws in your state and know how to make them work for you before you decide to sell the house. Fourlabs can help with consultancy on this issue, but this article also highlights some of the most important things to consider when selling your house.
Why Are You Selling Your House?
Are your reasons for selling your home good ones? For example, your current home cannot accommodate your extended family’s requirements anymore, and you want to buy a large home with more amenities and better comforts. But if you decide to hastily put your current home on the market to buy a bigger home, you might be making a major mistake. In case your new home stretches you too far financially, your finances may end up in ruin. On the other hand, moving might become a necessity when you have to change your job or experience a major life change. Under any circumstance, you should always weigh the pros and cons of keeping your current home versus selling it.
Can You Afford To Buy The New Home?
If you want to trade up your current property or want to buy a more costly home, you should perform an honest assessment of whether you can really afford the move. In fact, you are the only one who can answer this question and no mortgage broker or lender can answer it for you. The lender or mortgage agent might tell you the most that you can spend on the new home based on your income and down payment. But they are not in a position to tell you what you can really afford to spend to buy a new home.
Make sure you honestly know what you can really afford to spend on a home before you decide to buy the new home. Unless your assets and income have increased a lot compared to the time when you purchased the last home, you probably can’t afford a more expensive property. You should consider how spending on your new home will affect your ability to save for retirement before deciding to spend all that money on a new house.
What Is Your Current House Worth?
Make sure you have a better understanding of the value of your current home before you decide to sell it. You or your real estate agent should analyse what comparable properties in the region are currently selling for. When you are not in a hurry to sell the house, you might be tempted to grossly overprice the value of your current property hoping that an uneducated buyer will pay you more than your property’s real worth. The danger of such a strategy is that most buyers are not uneducated in today’s technologically advanced settings.
If you decide to lower the price to match the real value of the property, most buyers will be wary of investing in your property due to the extended length of time it has been on the market. In the end, you may really have a hard time getting 100% of what your house is worth.