Beating Home Buyer’s Remorse

Buyer’s remorse is a common affliction for all manners of purchases, but there is no remorse greater than worrying about the most expensive item in your life – your home.

Buyer’s Remorse

True buyer’s remorse is the worrying and wonder that comes after sealing the deal on a new home and a new home loan.  You begin to wonder almost immediately if you got the best price and feel uncertain about your decision.  Did you really need this house?  Could you have done better?  Often buyers question the mortgage rate and mortgage terms.  Rather than dwell on your decision and stew over what might have been, try to nip those feelings in the bud so that you can spend time enjoying your new home, not stressing because of it.

Do Your Homework

Before you even begin house hunting, be sure you know your market.  Look at many homes in the area and research home values from the recent past.  Are values going up?  Falling?  Staying consistent?  A few years ago, it made sense to rush into a home before the value continued to sky rocket.  In today’s market, just like researching mortgage rate and terms you have to make time to research, consider and evaluate all of your choices before committing to an offer.  Run the purchase price numbers and mortgage loan numbers through the mortgage calculator to get a comfort level on the total home costs.  Compare mortgage rates with different lenders and compare different rates and terms in the mortgage payment calculator.  Be sure to compare the costs in the mortgage calculators as well.

Preapproval

Eliminate worry by getting preapproval from your mortgage lender.  Check the numbers for a new mortgage loan yourself with the help of the mortgage payment calculator and mortgage qualification calculator.  Then have a mortgage lender or bank investigate your numbers include your income and credit to issue a preapproval letter.  Once you know exactly what the bank will allow you to spend on a new home (and what your own checkbook will allow), you can shop for a new home with confidence.  You won’t need to worry about how much payments will be on a particular house or if it would be a stretch.  You’ll shop armed with that knowledge so that you can focus on the actual home you’re inspecting not the imaginary inflated mortgage payments that go with it.

Get Another Opinion

If you tend to stall on major decisions, bring along your most trusted advisor.  The first advisor is of course, the mortgage payment calculator.  For extra help use the mortgage calculators to compare buying and renting and the mortgage terms comparison calculator.  For a human advisor, hopefully that person is a decision maker who’s not afraid to tell you exactly what he thinks about a property.  If his assessment agrees with your own, you’ll know that you are indeed seeing things correctly.  At the very least, feel free to run your decision by your parents or trusted sibling to see if they have any advice or opinions to share before you close.

Make it Yours

Once you’re in a home, distract yourself from wonder by working to make your new space your own.  Paint some walls, strip some wall paper, put down some new carpet.  Arrange your furniture in each room and buy new decorations to make each room highly personalized.  Create your own sanctuary or place of comfort within the home so that your mind isn’t wondering whether you could have bargained for less, it’s spending time in a state of utter peace and relaxation in a place you can call your very own.

Move On

If you find yourself dwelling, force yourself to move on.  Research your possible actions.  You’ll likely find that the best solution would be to sell your brand new home to try and find one for less.  The cost of selling, not to mention the headaches and stress, will remind you that some things just aren’t worth worrying about.  You did your research and made an educated decision.  You spent time planning your move and didn’t rush into a decision that wasn’t right for you.  You compared mortgage rates and costs in the market.  You evaluated the monthly mortgage payments and your budget using the mortgage calculators.  Now, it’s time to relax and enjoy that decision without worrying about what the neighbors are doing with their home or replaying possible scenarios in your mind.  It’s just a waste of energy you should be using to fix up your brand new house.

Tags: home loan, mortgage, mortgage calculators, mortgage lender, mortgage loan, mortgage payment calculator, mortgage payments, mortgage qualification calculator, mortgage rate

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Mortgage Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.