ElizabethT
Full time employment: Posting here.
After many, many years of hemming and hawing, we are finally t h i s close to putting our home on the market and relocating to within a couple of miles of the beach.
This has been an unexpectedly agonizing decision, with my best guess being that after so many years of pre-FIRE years of LBYM, I am struggling to do something that is actually within our means.
I am guessing that I'm not the only one that struggles with this?
Here is the situation we are evaluating:
- We are looking to purchase a home that may run upward of $200,000 more than our selling price. We are in Orange County, CA, one of the most expensive regions in the country, so $200,000 is not an astronomical difference here.
- We would sell our current home first, and pay for the new home in cash.
- Our property taxes would double, but the impact to our budget would be minimal as we have a large percentage allocated as misc discretionary, and would simply assign the necessary portion from that without altering our annual WR.
- The new home would represent 16.5% of our net worth, up from about 14% currently, but still well below the percentage average as I've researched it, which seems to run closer to 30% for those age 50 and older.
- The appreciation in the new area is greater than the appreciation where we are, and I do not see this changing in that there is only so much coastal adjacent land, and what there is is quite desirable here.
Other than the purchase price of the new home, all other living expenses would be comparable, even insurance in that the new home will be slightly smaller, and with less land, which would offset the higher sale price.
I am wondering if there might be anything we've overlooked in our excitement at making change? One can definitely lose perspective on a decision like this I think.
This has been an unexpectedly agonizing decision, with my best guess being that after so many years of pre-FIRE years of LBYM, I am struggling to do something that is actually within our means.
I am guessing that I'm not the only one that struggles with this?
Here is the situation we are evaluating:
- We are looking to purchase a home that may run upward of $200,000 more than our selling price. We are in Orange County, CA, one of the most expensive regions in the country, so $200,000 is not an astronomical difference here.
- We would sell our current home first, and pay for the new home in cash.
- Our property taxes would double, but the impact to our budget would be minimal as we have a large percentage allocated as misc discretionary, and would simply assign the necessary portion from that without altering our annual WR.
- The new home would represent 16.5% of our net worth, up from about 14% currently, but still well below the percentage average as I've researched it, which seems to run closer to 30% for those age 50 and older.
- The appreciation in the new area is greater than the appreciation where we are, and I do not see this changing in that there is only so much coastal adjacent land, and what there is is quite desirable here.
Other than the purchase price of the new home, all other living expenses would be comparable, even insurance in that the new home will be slightly smaller, and with less land, which would offset the higher sale price.
I am wondering if there might be anything we've overlooked in our excitement at making change? One can definitely lose perspective on a decision like this I think.