What Additional Buyer Expenses Should I Know About? (Video)

What Additional Buyer Expenses Should I Know About? (Video Transcription)

Hi, everyone. George Beleville here. I’m a realtor in Maryland, and this is a quick video to talk about additional buyer expenses when buying a house. Sometimes this gets left out of the conversation and the equation. We do have a whole section in our buyer packet that we provide in the buyer path presentation on our website that you can look at, which actually has numbers associated with this. But I wanted to just quickly go over some of the things that you might not be thinking about when you’re thinking about buying a house and you’re thinking about the mortgage and the insurance and the taxes and all that.

So first of all, there could be an expense if you’re in an apartment and you need to break your lease. If you find the perfect house and you really want to move on it, but you have time left on your lease, sometimes you might have two months or something of rent that you might have to pay to break the lease. That’s definitely something to think about.

The other things are obviously the home inspections have an expense and depending on which ones you do, and if you have well and septic, that can add up. I mean, can be easily well over $1000 to $2,000. For some of those, the appraisal is generally going to be around 500 or so dollars, perhaps more that you might not have thought of. There could be cleaning expenses sometimes when you move in, you might want to clean it yourself, but a lot of people will pay a professional to come in to do that for them. That can be a few hundred dollars.

Of course there are moving expenses. If you need to rent a van yourself, have your friends do it. Beer and pizza, move like people do sometimes. Or if you want to pay a professional, that can also be an added expense that you need to think about. And these are all expenses that come out of your pocket. These are not borrowed money like a mortgage. You need to have the cash to do this.

Another thing that sometimes people forget about is window treatments. Sometimes when you buy a house, they have that all and you don’t have to worry about. Sometimes they don’t have any or they have a very few that you don’t like and blinds, curtains, window treatments and all that can very quickly add up. So it’s a good thing to have those on the back burner to think about those in advance so that you’re not surprised by them.

One of the things we pride on ourselves on is eliminating as many surprises as we can from the process. That’s why we tend to be pretty successful with each transaction, they 99 plus percent, I’m sure, probably go to closing for us. And that’s part of the reasons we try to eliminate surprises. So if you go to our website and look, we have what’s called the buyer path. And in that buyer path presentation, which is what we do in person with buyers, there is a section in there that has estimates on a lot of the cost for inspections and things like that. Definitely a good thing to look at.

So hopefully this is helpful. And if you have any questions, let us know. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye.