Originally Posted by
topflightpro
Congratulations on the wedding and house.
My MIL offered to give us the money they would have spent on the wedding had we eloped. My wife insisted on the huge wedding. Then she realized what a PIA it is to plan and how much she hates being the center of attention. Oh well, it was too late at that point, and we had the huge wedding. I don't remember much of it. We spent the whole time thanking everyone for coming, which took several hours considering we had like 300 people there. It wasn't a lot of fun for us, but everyone else loved the party.
As for your house, make sure you get a good home inspection.
the other one being (at the risk of sounding like a killjoy), unless one knows the stay at the house is greater than 4-5 years (@TKP mentioned moving for schools), it's most often better to rent and invest (CD for the risk averse, index fund for the more adventurous). Taxes (1-2% of purchase value per year), closing costs (2-3% of purchase value), and agent's fees (6% of purchase value) costs that one has to eat. Also plan to spend ~1% of purchase value per year on maintenance. Don't use the NYT buy v rent calculator (as it assumes a 3% appreciation and the fact that itemized deduction would be more favorable), use this one:
https://michaelbluejay.com/house/rentvsbuy.html
When my then partner (and now wife) and I moved to Wisconsin, we were seriously considering about buying, but as we will most likely leave in another ~3 years, it made no sense. The aforementioned costs on a $300k house (with tax rate of ~2%) would have been ~$95k for a 15-yr mortgage and ~$102k for a 30-yr mortgage. Breaking even would have required an annualized return of ~2.5% (and this doesn't take into account of the maintenance costs), and we weren't confident that we'd necessarily see that sort of return. Remember that buying for short term with a loan is basically investing using margin accounts: the gains could be amplified, but so could the loses. Caveat emptor and all that