How To Buy A House 263 Miles Away

Hello friends! Welcome to Notes from the Road, where we crack the code on your 50s and beyond. In this issue:

• How to buy a house 263 miles away.

• Newsletter spotlight: Daily Upsider

• Planning for the three stages of retirement.

• Beating sleep problems with non-sleep deep rest.

• Stop wasting precious time, Gen X!

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Ugggghhhh. Okay, I guess we need to talk about the house hunt.

As I’ve shared in previous newsletters, we’re looking for a house, several states away.

We downsized—too much—and now we’re bursting at the seams. We’re also lonely. We love our friends, but our small and dwindling family lives far away.

We’ve been looking for over a year. You may have heard that the real estate market is brutal right now in some places. That’s where we’re looking.

If you dream of doing something like this someday, here’s my serious and very heartfelt advice to you. (Don’t end up like me! No, seriously, really, don’t.) If you plan to move to a new area, follow these rules:

Start NOW. If you think there’s any chance you’ll be relocating more than an hour or two away from where you currently live, begin today. Narrow your potential locations down to one. Vacation there. Stay for a month or two, in a residential neighborhood. Meet people. Learn the neighborhoods. Join the gyms. Study the housing stock. Sound like too much? Imagine learning these things in multi-day sprints when you’re also looking for a home. And living in a hotel. Or sleeping in a relative’s guest bedroom.

Figure out what you want. Sounds easy, but it’s not. This might be your last home. If you have unrealized dreams of the perfect kitchen, make sure that gets top billing in your search. Also, what neighborhoods are most aligned to people on the glide path to retirement and an empty nest? (Hint: Maybe not the ones with the suburban colonials). What do you want for this new stage? What tradeoffs will you need to make?

Know your budget. This may require you to go down a retirement budget rabbit hole. Determine if you’ll need a mortgage, and if so, how much mortgage you can afford, especially in later life. Will this be your forever house, just a pitstop on the way to assisted living? Can you afford all of the other expenses that go with homeownership, especially if your income decreases?

If your search is coming soon:

Get prequalified, if you need a mortgage. Even better, go through the underwriting process and get a fully qualified approval. Some lenders offer this. It’s painstaking but you’re going to have to pull together all your financial records eventually anyway. If you’re in a competitive market, this will give you a leg up on other bidders and is very close to same as cash.

Get a real estate agent. Don’t be casual about this. There have been huge changes in the commission structure since you last moved. Develop a strategy for dealing with that. Interview at least three agents. Review a standard purchase contract. Learn how to put a proper offer together quickly. What are your points of leverage in a deal? What can you do to sweeten the pot if you want to make a good offer? Learn the steps in the purchasing process and the timing of each e.g., the time sellers usually take to accept an offer, when the inspection takes place, how long to closing, etc. Don’t try to learn all of this when your dream house is on the table.

Get a lawyer. You’ll need one to help you navigate the process. I prefer to find my own rather than one recommended by my real estate agent. Interview three of them.

Get an inspector. Have one ready to go so you can move quickly when your offer is accepted. As above, I prefer to find my own. Reddit is a good place to find recommendations by word of mouth for many areas.

And last but absolutely and definitely not least, develop a travel strategy if there’s more than one of you making this move. Nobody really talks about this. It has been the most exhausting and complicated part of this process for us.

Why? Unless you’re comfortable with one person traveling to the location and assessing whether you should bid on a house, you’ll want to be there together. What happens when your dream house comes on the market on a Thursday morning in a competitive market? One of you goes there and looks and the other follows a day or two later? You both drop everything and go together? If the house is not good, or if you lose a bidding war, you’ve just lost several days and probably hundreds of dollars. (And also, do you have pets that you need to deal with in this scenario?)

After a year of trying to make the above options work, we’ve thrown in the towel and are renting an apartment for 1-3 months at a time. As strange as it sounds, it’s the least stressful option we’ve tried yet.

I’ll keep you posted.

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