8 Inexpensive Ways to Prepare Your Home for Sale

November 14, 2016

Are you selling your home or thinking about doing so? Time to get to work – your home needs a pre-sale makeover. Once you’ve decided to sell it, think of your home more like a product and less like your home. You probably don’t want to invest a lot of money in major changes (despite what certain home renovation shows encourage). Here are eight inexpensive ways to prepare your home for a satisfying sale:

Remove Half of Your Stuff

Buyers want to imagine themselves in your home, and they can’t do it if it’s full of your stuff. Banish your clutter and create spaciousness. Unless you’re a minimalist, you probably have a lot to remove. Now is the time for a major purge.

For most items, if you haven’t looked at them in  a year, you probably don’t need them anymore. Homes for sale also generally look better with less furniture, so get some feedback from your real estate agent on what to remove. Spend as long as it takes to clear your house of half your things: throw away, recycle, donate, and sell what you no longer want and put the rest in a storage unit. See this list from Realtor.com for decluttering tips before a home sale. Everything that’s left should be arranged neatly, with personal items out of sight and off floors and surfaces.

Fix the Problems That Are Easy to Fix

Do you have marks on the wall from nails, discolored grout in the bathroom or an old refrigerator? You might not notice them, but a potential buyer will. Make a list of all the small projects and get a handy person in for the day to fix them all (or if you’re the handy one block out time to do this). If your appliances are old – and you have the cash – consider replacing them. For a checklist of things you should consider repairing, click here.

Repaint the Walls

Consider repainting your walls with neutral colors if you haven’t repainted in the past two years or you have highly personal color choices. If you are handy and detail-oriented, you could consider doing this yourself. If you’re not, a professional painter is worth the money.

Refresh Your Floors

Beautiful wood floors can add value to your home. If you have them, consider refinishing them if they are damaged or scratched or update them to a modern stain. According to Realtor.com, costs can be as low as $1 per square foot for recoating and as high as $5 per square foot for a custom look. If you have older carpet, consider replacing it (costs $1-$10 per square foot installed for) for a fresh and clean look. If your carpets are newer, get them professionally cleaned.

Clean the Inside until Spotless – and Keep it Clean

Even if you’re a clean freak, you’ll probably have to keep your home even cleaner while you’re showing it to potential buyers. Once you’ve refreshed your interior, give your home a top to bottom cleaning (or hire someone to do it for you). Think of it as if you are “detailing” your home. Look at every baseboard and around every light switch. Your home should pass the white glove test.

The hard part will be keeping it that way during the period you are showing your home. That’s when you’ll be glad you removed half your stuff. There’s less to clean now!

Beautify Your Yard

Once the inside of your home is squeaky clean, you can turn to the outside. Rake leaves, mow the lawn regularly and weed all your gardens. Put down mulch (if you use it) for a fresh look. Plant flowers around your home and/or in pots by your front door.

And speaking of the door – does it look good? If not, add that to the list of things to be painted. For more tips on landscaping your home to increase curb appeal, click here.

Upgrade Your Lighting

Good lighting can add to your home’s appeal to potential buyers. Make sure each room has at least three sources of lighting. This could be overhead lighting, standing lamps, table lamps, etc. Real estate agents will often leave all the lights on when showing a home so use energy efficient bulbs (and prepare for higher electricity bills during that period). For more tips on lighting, see this article.

Hire a Professional Stager

There’s a science to making homes look their best for a sale. Consider consulting with a home staging expert to set your home up for maximum appeal to potential buyers. A stager will work with what you already have in your home to rearrange and redecorate. Please don’t take her feedback personally if she doesn’t like your floor to ceiling collection of knickknacks and wants to banish them to storage. It’s a stager’s job to look at your home objectively to have the broadest appeal to buyers.

Selling your home can be an emotional time. The process you go through to prepare your home for sale not only sets you up to succeed, but also prepares you for your eventual move. It’s work – but it doesn’t have to be expensive!

 

Do you have a question you’d like answered on the blog? Please email me at [email protected]. You can follow me on the blog by signing up here, and on Twitter @cynthiameyer_FF.

Do You Know the Real Costs of Home Ownership?

August 15, 2016

How much does owning a home really cost? It’s more than you think it will. Owning a home requires more financial resources than just paying the mortgage. You must be prepared to make an ongoing investment in the care of your home. If you are thinking of buying a home or just want to plan better for the costs of keeping up your property, take this quiz to test your home ownership savvy:

1. What kind of damage does a standard homeowner’s insurance policy cover?

a) sewer back up

b) flood

c) termites

d) none of the above

Answer: d  Homeowner’s insurance is designed to cover events that are sudden and accidental, not things that could be prevented with routine maintenance, such as pest control or inspecting a sewer line for tree roots. In addition, standard homeowner’s insurance policies do not cover floods, but flood insurance may be purchased from the National Flood Insurance Program. Many homeowners find this out the hard way after a problem has already occurred.

Review your homeowner’s insurance once a year to make sure you’re covered for your risks. For an additional premium of $50-$400, you may be able to add coverage for certain perils to your standard policy. If you are considering buying in a flood region, keep in mind while flood insurance averages $700 per year, premiums can be exponentially higher if you live in a very high risk area.  Make sure you keep additional cash reserves in the amount of your homeowner’s insurance deductible as part of your emergency fund.

2. The average annual cost of a home repairs and maintenance is:

a) one half of 1 percent of the home’s value

b) 1 to 4 percent of the home’s value

c) $2500

d) $1250

Answer: b  What will you do when the furnace breaks, the roof leaks or you need to replace a washing machine? Don’t forget to look at maintenance costs before leaping into home ownership. For a $250,000 property, that means budgeting $2,500 to $10,000 for home repair and maintenance costs every year.

While it’s difficult to predict what is going to need repair or replacing during the year, count on the fact that something is going to require work. Have a brand new home with new appliances? You can probably get by for the first decade by reserving 1 percent of your home’s value in liquid savings to meet repair/maintenance expenses. Got a 150 year old house? You may find that maintenance and repair costs closer to 4 percent of the home’s value per year.

3. How much more will a mortgage cost if you have fair to good, but not excellent, credit?

a) .25 to 1.5 percent more than the rate of borrowers with high credit scores

b) .25 percent less than the rate for borrowers with high credit scores

c) the same as the rate for borrowers with high credit scores

d) people with fair credit scores will find it very hard to get a mortgage

Answer: a  The average FICO score for U.S. borrowers is good but not excellent, at 695. At current rates, a borrower with that score would pay about  four tenths of a percent more than a borrower in the highest tier of credit scores. According to this calculator for a $200,000 fixed rate 30 year term mortgage, the borrower with the average FICO score would pay $15,768 more in interest over the life of the loan given current rates – about  $44 more per month. Try this mortgage loan comparison tool to compare mortgages.

4. Maintaining the land and gardens surrounding my home is likely to require regular:

a) tree trimming and removal

b) lawn care, such as buying a lawnmower and garden tools or paying a landscaping service

c) investments in plants, bushes and other garden features

d) all of the above

Answer: d  If you have outdoor space, maintaining the lawn and garden is an important component of your home’s value. Doing all the work on the lawn and garden yourself is cost effective, but it will still cost money for equipment, plants and outdoor furniture, so make sure to include that in your annual budget. If you plan to hire help, expect to pay $40-$120 per visit for landscaping and lawn care, depending on where you live and the size of your property. Tree care is not something people can usually do on their own, so if you have large trees, make sure to budget for a tree service. The cost of trimming or removing just one large tree could be as much as $500 to $1000 because of the hazards involved.

5. When buying a home, homeowners generally spend how much on furnishing their new space:

a) $15,147

b) $3,895

c) $5,288

d) $9,733

Answer:  c   According to a National Association of Home Builders study, new home buyers spent $5,288 on furniture in the first year after buying a home built in 2004 or later. Many homebuyers fail to budget for what it will take to turn their house into a home that meets their personal aesthetic. It is unrealistic to think you won’t want to make changes. Expect that you will want to personalize your new space with paint, furniture and accessories and include those costs in your home buying budget.

Do you have questions or comments about the costs of home ownership? Email me at [email protected]. You can also follow me on Twitter @cynthiameyer_FF.

 

 

Power Tools Aren’t Just for Professionals

September 16, 2014

Are you an HGTV fan like me? If so, you’ll probably be watching the premier tonight of The Jennie Garth Project, where the recently divorced 90210 star takes on a rehab of a 1970s ranch home in Hollywood Hills.  Based on the previews, she’s not afraid to pick up a power tool to get the job done. Continue reading “Power Tools Aren’t Just for Professionals”

7 Ways to Reduce the Single Biggest Expense for Retirees

February 27, 2012

Housing costs and related household expenses make up the single largest spending category for Americans over fifty, a recent study by Employee Benefit Research Institute reports.  This has many pre-retirees concerned because for most retirees’, their income declines or is fixed but certainly doesn’t grow.  At the same time, expenses just keep on coming.  While household expenses eventually decline with age as Americans reach their mid–eighties, health care costs increase substantially for that age group, wiping out any advantage of the cost savings. Continue reading “7 Ways to Reduce the Single Biggest Expense for Retirees”