The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[Apoc]

Everyone already answered the original question Mr Sensitive.

[.RJ]

It's not untrue you can build wealth with property, but too many people get caught up in TAH RENTAL INCUMZ ideal. You know how you get to a satisfactory income/savings level in your 20s? Move at the drop of a hat for any job that piques your interest in a high growth company.

Also the house you want to live in is probably not the house you want to generate rental income and vice versa, and you dont necessarily have to live where you own thats what property management is for - but - that said - in your 20's funneling some money into index funds and forgetting about it goes a long way and I wish I'd done that.

Think of it this way, if your goal is to build wealth - if you have the $$ to purchase a $550k house, best case scenario of 3.5% down (FHA loan) plus closing costs and other misc expenses you're gonna need $40k up front.  If you put $40k into an index fund, presuming an 8% return, you'll have $400k in 30 years by doing nothing, and if you have a conservative 6% plus 3% employer match into a 401k, you'll have somewhere between $1.5-2M depending on how your salary tracks over time and you can fuck off your desk job whenever you want after that.  Again, doing nothing.  Now that ties you up a little bit if you want to buy a home later since you need that chunk of $$ but you can save as your salary goes up.

Food for thought.  If I didnt already own a house I wouldnt be looking right now, the market is full on batshit crazy, and the thought crossed my mind to cash out and move out of this place after seeing what my neighbors house just sold for.

[Apoc]

If we want to upgrade in Seattle, we're looking at $1.1 - 1.2 mil. If I wasn't trying to get a free move, we'd be moving to a lower cost city.

[Tyler.M]

Also don't buy a house while you are young and not married. You'll spend your free time maintaining the house and limit your relocation abilities dramatically. Rushing into home ownership is something I see all the time. My roommate from jmu bought a house a few years ago, I told him not, and he just sold it. Too much maintenance and house for a single guy. Doesn't help he's not handy.

I even think Emily and I rushed to buy our first townhouse. I wish we rented longer so we could have moved around a bit. Building equity isn't the end all be all. Renting has many benefits.

There are lots of options for less than 20% down now and no PMI. SHOP YOUR LENDERS. Although 2 years out is too early to do so. Rates and products will change between now and then.

I did this my junior year of college. The man's not wrong. I would have been a lot more willing to move out of the area if I didn't have my house but I was also living with my parents and hated the idea of paying for rent. The pragmatist won out in the end but looking back, I definitely have mixed feelings. It pushed me into a loop of always working to afford my mortgage, even when having renters living in my little space with me. It turned out well for me now but I also locked myself into always needing a particular salary level when I probably could have been a bit more adventurous and took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do in my 20's.  Mortgages don't make a lot of sense if you're in a career building phase, unless you plan to rent it out once you move for a new job and use it to build your net worth. That's my reasoning to keep the property long term but I wouldn't recommend it to most people.

[Deceus]

Things are finally slowing down so I figured I'd share some of the insanity so far...

Adventure #1 Deceus comes to town.

I had a pretty packed schedule work-wise the week before the move and with the girlfriend unemployed I figured she could handle packing. Just take everything, put it in boxes and take to the garage/basement. Simple, or so I thought.

4 days out: things are 25% packed tops. The stuff that is packed is all in tiny boxes. This is where I started to realized I fucked up. What was done was everything from every closet and cabinet was pulled out and covering every square inch of counter and floor space... Apparently this all apart of some grand plan I just wasn't aware of. Pay for packers next time, got it.

3 days out: now we're maybe 33% packed but nothing is downstairs. Things are now at least going into medium sized boxes.

2 day out: 50% packed, somehow not much has gotten done. Full blown panic sets in and I spend most of the night getting everything I can downstairs and staged well for the movers. A few trips to Lowe's for massive heavy duty bins and the garage/basement is done in what has to be record time. Oh and I get rear ended in the truck during one of these trips. Put a decent dent in the bumper just above the hitch. I let it go without filing a claim because I didn't care or have the time/energy to deal with anything at this point.

1 day out: Get up at the crack of dawn, realize we're still 60% packed, panic continues. Sell my big ass grill for $50, sell the treadmill/rack/platform for $250, make multiple runs to the landfill. Movers get in and we're only 80% packed up. They fly through all the packed/stage stuff in less than an hour. The truck is 85-90% full and they ask what all is left. I don't have a great answer to that except: a ton of random shit spread out through out the house. So the packers spend the second hour just grabbing random stuff and the last bit of the truck doesn't really get packed very well. Truck: 100% full, house: 90% packed ... fuck.

SHITSHOW TIME/DAY 0: My dad gets in and lends a hand. Destroyed more cheap particle board furniture, more dump runs. Unpack 10% of the truck, throw caution to the wind and just start recklessly throwing shit into the middle of the truck where we can and making the mother of all leaning junk towers. Leave some stuff with neighbor to come back for. My poor dad had to make about 100 trips up and down my cliff of a driveway after repeatedly being promised everything would be done and we'd just be hopping in and driving. We're leaving at close to 5pm. That's only about 8 hours later than expected. The drive was pretty uneventful. The Penske could barely do 45 up some of the hills in NC and there was constant 30+mph gusts the entire time and it's somehow 30 fucking degrees.

MOVE-IN DAY: I drop my dad off at enterprise and give him a bottle of Blanton's for the trouble. During the walkthrough I walked straight to the one skimmer basket on the pool and it's blocked solid with leaves. Looks like it hasn't been cleared out in weeks and they probably haven't cared for the pool in months. So to prevent the pump from burning up, I get down and clear it all out. It's still freezing outside but a few handfuls later it's clear. Hey the rough part is over right? ... wrong. The realtor lets me know I won't get the keys until the deed is recorded but let me park the car in the garage. Didn't think much of it, figured I'd sign and it'd be a done deal like last time. I found out at the siging that the attorneys have to send the documents to the lender, who sends them back and then they send it to the county before the deed is officially recorded ... great. The lender makes some last minute requests and I'm stuck sitting in the driveway at the new place for a few hours. 5pm comes and goes, I've got a restless 7 year old and cat in the car and not sure if I'm going to be homeless for the night ... great. While we wait I call my dad ask where he put the truck keys ... they're in his coat pocket. No worries though he'll just overnight em to me. 6pm rolls through and someone must've stayed late for me because I get confirmation that the deed is officially mine. It's close to 7 before we get in. All I can think about is how I'm getting the truck back tomorrow and the unpackers showing up to a death trap at 9 am tomorrow. I try to setup the internet because I have all day meetings tomorrow I have to be at. The team is planning out work for the rest of the year. Spectrum can't find my modem no matter what outlet I try or what I do. They have to send a tech and I have to wait 2 days. I stay up most of the night again clearing out the worst of the wreckage and make it somewhat safe to unload.

SHIT SHOW 2-POINT-OH: I'm up at 6am because I can't fucking sleep, the cat and kid taking turns freaking out all night being in a new house. Check UPS around 7am and it looks like the keys made it to Raleigh at 4am and just made it to Charlotte. Thankfully something looks to be going smoo... wait a minute an update at 8:30 from Richmond. "Your package has been delayed because ... reasons." The key never left Richmond but they assure my Dad it'll be in by 5. Unloaders show up and knock it out of the park. UPS gives us excuses until 3pm and then finally stops letting us past the tier 1 guys. They stick to their guns but the key simply isn't coming. I call Penske roadside and they're fucking awesome. They get me a key cut at one of their maintenance shops and let me know it'd be faster to pick it up, so I do. Fucking finally. Get to the truck with the key and ... it won't turn lol. Looks like it wasn't cut super well. They send out a tech with a better key and it won't turn either... it's been re-keyed at some point without Penske's knowledge. We wait on UPS til 5pm because they still haven't backed down from their promise they haven't lost the key. Eventually they send out a locksmith who makes a key on the spot based on the lock. It's 8:30pm and I roll into the Kannapolis Home Depot a full 10 hours late and get the truck turned in just before closing. The tech shows up the next moring and discovers the line from the street to the house is dead. At least it's something only kind of stupid and not me forgetting to plug something in. He runs a temp cable and I'm in business... Fucking finally, for real this time.

Stay tuned for the next episode: Deceus buys a hot tub.

[Jake]

Chris after all of this:

[Deceus]

Chris after all of this:

Accurate, raided the girlfriend's stash and she was apparently given some anti-anxiety medication pretty close to Xanax at some point. I took 2 and went into a coma once we got back from dropping the truck off.

[JPolen01]

Oh man I wish I didn't see this coming, but I did.

Pro tip: take off work the day before and the day after a move.

The way you function gives me anxiety.


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[Deceus]

It's a slow morning and this is hopefully as entertaining as it is therapeutic for me.

Deceus buys a hot tub

So I awaken from my coma: body and spirit broken. Why has the universe forsaken me, I ask. Suddenly a rouge idea enters my brain. "You know what would take the sting out of doing a shit ton of work to that pool just to close it? A hot tub." Surely there isn't anything worthwhile in stock... Holy shit, look at that, the exact make/model I was eyeballing listed 12 hours ago for $5,000. These things are $15,000 new. Fairly new as well. It's an older lady and she losing her stability so she can't get in/out of it anymore and just wants someone else to enjoy it. Jackpot. I put a deposit down, call the people who put in to get it out and call an electrician. The movers did their part wonderfully. It was out and at my place in less than 2 hours and 40 minutes of it was driving.



The electrician on the other hand gave the most half-assed "quote" ever. Showed up with his kid in the truck. Glanced around the yard, told me he couldn't use the pool panel since the power feed wires were too small. Incorrectly assumed the 220 outlet by the driveway was only rated for 30A and planned to "maybe" run a line from the crawlspace and dig up the entire yard for the low, low price of $1,750. $300 off if I dig the trench for him. "Fuck that" I said to myself because I'm clearly an idiot. "How hard can it be" will definitely be my last words. So I brush up on residential electricity and start looking at things and boy are they ugly. That double booked breaker the inspector mentioned? It's a 50A RV outlet and a set of 10awg wire going 90ft+ to the pool subpanel. Holy fire-hazard batman. No way that wire is carrying anything close to 50 amps for any amount of time. I take a look at the panel and realized it's going to be a party ... minus the fun.



Lizards, lizard shit and dead spiders galore. As an added bonus the post wobbles like it's only one foot deep in mud. Start disconnecting things and plan to run some 6/3 UF wire to it. For some reason the wires just simply won't pull. They won't even budge ... guess it's time to start digging. It didn't take long to start seeing some more ugly shit:



Conduit pinching some wires and completely packed with clay, that could be problem. But no dice, still not even a budge after I clear all that out. Onwards. Tried to be clever and use my fishing tape to skip some of the dig. Find another blockage 12ft up but can't find the conduit on the other side of the fence so I give up and dig the whole way. For some reason the "straight" conduit hooks a hard right towards the cement because fuck me.




Found it!



What could possibly be in that mess.



Oh and the post really was hanging on by a thread lol.



Gave up at this point and ran the 6/3 UF through some new conduit since it had no chance of fitting in that 3/4" conduit anyways. Gave up again because that stuff is the hardest shit in the world to work with. Had to buy 4 500ft rolls of THHN-2 but managed to pull it through just fine and get a new post. Picked up my post hole digger and got to work. Remember when it was 30 degrees while I was unloading and all my jackets were still packed up ... well it's 81 now. Good times.

Get get all the wires stripped and cut to length ... and one of the lugs is completely seized. New box it is. Get that in and finish up the wiring. Flip the breakers half-way hoping this is what finally takes me out but nope. No sparks, no fires. Just a hot tub booting up.



Still have to finish a few things up and have to add some of that mess back in to get my pool pump working again. I got all this done JUST in time for the remnants of a hurricane to roll through.

---

Oh man I wish I didn't see this coming, but I did.

Pro tip: take off work the day before and the day after a move.

The way you function gives me anxiety.


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Hey give me more credit than that.

1. Gave the girlfriend a full 2 weeks to pack up. She procrastinates like no other. I knew this so that's on me.
2. The plan was to cut out early Friday to finish up, load up Saturday, drive Sunday, sign Monday and work while the unloaders did their thing Tuesday. Didn't have a choice with taking time off the day after. The quarterly planning was set in stone at the beginning of the year and was happening with or without me.
3. I called Spectrum twice to verify the house was ready and then to verify my modem was compatible. I've never had an issue getting myself setup until now of course.

Sometimes the universe just aligns to fuck you over despite the best of planning.

[Tyler.M]

I can't wait for the next episode.

[Sijray21]

This reminds me when a friend asks to help pack his 24ft truck for his VA to TN move a couple years ago. I show up... Maybe 5% is packed and furniture is not broken down (bed frames, modular tables/desks, etc.)

Show up at 10am thinking I'd be out by 1pm.... I left at 11pm and they still had plenty to pack for the love the next day...

[Deceus]

This reminds me when a friend asks to help pack his 24ft truck for his VA to TN move a couple years ago. I show up... Maybe 5% is packed and furniture is not broken down (bed frames, modular tables/desks, etc.)

Show up at 10am thinking I'd be out by 1pm.... I left at 11pm and they still had plenty to pack for the love the next day...

I was trying really hard not to be super pissed...

This was me every night coming down to check on the progress.

[Sijray21]

Gotta communicate about that stuff though. Not sure how your partner is on that, but mine is terrible unless I say something. Then when she doesn't do it to my level of satisfaction I just do it myself and tell her to handle other things around the house she can handle if she complains.

[Deceus]

Gotta communicate about that stuff though. Not sure how your partner is on that, but mine is terrible unless I say something. Then when she doesn't do it to my level of satisfaction I just do it myself and tell her to handle other things around the house she can handle if she complains.

Oh I try haha. It's like pushing a wet noodle. Prodding usually just leads to more frustration on both ends. I should've pulled the plug and hired packers last minute when nothing really got started that first week.

---

Seriously though, fuck this stuff. Only went with UF because I assumed THHN-2 wire wasn't rated for wet environments like THWN wire is. Turns out THHN-2 is short for THHN-THWN-2, it's simply certified for both. I suppose it's not too bad if you're crazy enough to direct bury it and aren't dealing with 6awg wire. A lone 6 gauge wire is unwieldy enough, putting 3 of them and a ground into what can only be described as melted PVC is a nightmare.

3/4" conduit for scale

[WRXtranceformed]

Dude...

[.RJ]

what the fuck is wrong with you?

[rherold9]

What in the actual fuck is going on in here

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[Deceus]

what the fuck is wrong with you?

If I had to guess I'm slowly descending into insanity and need distractions from my own impending doom... Or something like that.

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[Apoc]

It's like when your cousin starts using the hard drugs and you know he's just punishing himself, but you can't do anything except watch and hope he decides to save himself one day.

[Deceus]

It's like when your cousin starts using the hard drugs and you know he's just punishing himself, but you can't do anything except watch and hope he decides to save himself one day.

To be fair, I asked for none of that moving mess and spent a good bit of time planning to try and avoid it. I was just along for the ride there. The hot tub mess was on me though. I'd be a lot more pissed at myself if I didn't learn a ton in the process. Spent about what he quoted me on materials but half of those fixes weren't included in that quote and he certainly wasn't going to rewire that panel for me at that price.

The good news is I got a $5,500 quote to pour a concrete floor for the 40'x16' basement and I'm 100% taking it. No way in hell I'm taking that job on.