Yes, budgeting generally and (quite rightly) considered to be the least glamorous aspect of preparing for a major investment such as the purchase of a house in Atlanta, for the very first time in your life. As a matter of fact, you have certainly had to cut a whole lot of corners with regard to your overall lifestyle and also set about tightening the ‘proverbial belt’ before you can be in a position to purchase that ‘dream house’ that you had hitherto been saving for, your whole life.
But regardless of how annoying or boring you may find it to be, this is a crucial part of the whole exercise regarding all of your pre-purchase activities. Here, the important point to consider is that once you have learnt enough of your own financial affairs, not only will you then be in a position to exactly know what you can actually afford, but perhaps far more significantly, what you really cannot.
Granted it is not exactly the most interesting of exercise, but it is still pretty much the only way to help ensure that you are in a position to be able to balance out both your income generating abilities and juxtapose the same, to your overall daily expenses.
The most important aspect of the whole budgeting exercise is that it essentially helps and in fact, facilitates your own understanding of your spending patterns viz. both short as well aslong-term ones too. Once you understand where the bulk of your money has been going all along, you will be in a position to better streamline all of your cash inflows and outflows. And in this way, you should be better able to plan for bigger expenses and subsequent investments such as a house purchase later on in life.
A simple MS Excel worksheet that you always use to keep stock of every aspect of your day to day expenses will help you acquire a bird’s eye view of the expense chart, as a whole. You will subsequently be in a better position to extrapolate for pretty much the rest of the year (if not for a whole decade). However, this is all part and parcel of the whole of the education process and it is imperative that you do this at least a few months before you actively start your search for that ideal home.
o Make acomprehensive game plan
You should also try and draft a detailed and comprehensive purchase plan that should be based on all the information you have hitherto gleaned while learning all about buying a house. Moreover, you should also try and educate yourself regarding the various clauses of such a plan along with the core aim that you may have in mind.
It should facilitate your core ambition of finding your ‘dream property’
This is an example of a basic purchase plan that you can easily follow:
- Set the core criteria of the plan
- Do your research
- Define the strategy
- Do your due diligence
- Get an appraisal by duly qualified consultants in the property market
- Fine tune your whole list of prospective properties
- Make sure all your homework is complete
- Make an offer
For more information regarding the importance of budgeting when looking for a home you can check out https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMPUUoPTYQG0lHc8wp8SkMQ?view_as=subscriber or log on to http://lutherragsdale.com/shop
For a free one on one consultation to discuss buying and selling real estate contact me at luther(at)platinumrealestate(dotted)com