I currently own a home and make my monthly payments without any problem. My wife and I make nearly 50 thousand more a year then when we orginally purchased our home. Unfortunatley the housing market has crashed and I have no equity in my Home and my mortgage is probably more than what my house is worth. I need a bigger home. What options do I have?

1) Pay down your existing Mortgage until it’s less than the (then current) house value … this is better than saving (unless, by some miracle, you can make more interest on your savings (after Tax) than you are paying interest on the mortgage = in which case SAVE UP until you have enough to move).

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2) Get a ‘personal loan’ to cover the different (NOT recommended .. interest rates can only go up from here)

I live in a coastal city in San Diego county. I am 5 miles from the beach. San Diego has the highest prices in California.

An average home is about $600,000 and I have seen one bedroom crap houses with no yards for over $400,000.

I live in a 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath condo. It is pretty much a regular house (2 car garage, yard, two story, no other units attached, etc.) only my home has a condo ownership, so its less money than a house.

My mother keeps talking about how one day my husband and I will want to move out of our Home, but how will that be possible when a home here will make us house poor?

We could rent out our condo, but we would still need a huge loan. Or we could sell our home and put the money towards a new house but then we would still have a loan that is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How is this possible? How do people afford to buy a home?

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I can only see us buying a house out of state since California will bleed us dry!

Any advice?
My condo will be paid off next year. It would sell for over $400,000

I would suggest two options, either sell your home and use most of your proceeds as down money to help lower the mortgage payments or refinance and take cash out to use as down money and rent out your condo. Keep in mind the interest you pay can be written off on your taxes, make sure your consult your CPA. There is no easy way about getting a bigger home but from the sounds of it you and your husband have been good with your finances and I’m sure could make it work if it is truly something that you wanted to do. I hope this helps you but if you need help or have any questions please email me tadgeman@yahoo.com.

I work for a small business. I do all of my work (except client site visits) from my home office. However, since I also use my home office for personal use during non-working hours, I assume I cannot take the home office deduction (correct)?

Here is my question regarding mileage – I’m testing this using both TaxCut and TurboTax. In both cases, when I enter my mileage, it does not seem to reduce my tax owed. When I tell the program I want to use the home office deduction, then my mileage makes a difference. If I tell it not to do the home office deduction, then my entering mileage makes no difference. So, can I only deduct my mileage if I take the home office deduction? I haven’t read anything to indicate this, but the actions of the tax software programs leads me to believe that this is the case.

I don’t know if this matters, but I itemize my deductions (mostly due to mortgage interest & real estate taxes paid). I do not take the standard deduction.
Edit – I am a W2 employee. This is less than 2% of our joint AGI, so I guess that’s why it isn’t letting me take it. Thanks for the replies!

For the home office deduction, if you use a portion of your home just for business, you may deduct your home expenses up to the percentage of square feet you use for business when compared to the total square feet of your home (If you use 100 sq. ft for business and the total home is 1000 sq ft, it is 10%).

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You do not have to take home office deductions to be able to take mileage on your vehicle. I am not familiar with Tax Cut or Turbo Tax, but there is probably a spot that you can put the vehicle as an asset (listed property) of the Business and then put the total miles driven in 2005 and total business miles driven in 2005 (pre-September 1 is 0.405 per mile and post-August 31 is 0.485 per mile).

The way you’re describing this makes it sound like it is unreimbursed expenses for a job you receive a W-2 from, and these deductions would be filed on a Form 2106 for Schedule A, which is subject to a 2% floor, meaning if your AGI is 100,000, you have to have 2,000 in deductions before you get one dollar deducted. You will also have to be able to itemize on Sch. A before your tax would change.

If this is your business and you’re self-employed, there should be no limitation on the mileage, unless you accidentally have it set to where you take actual expenses (fuel, oil, repairs, depreciation, etc.). You have to take one or the other, and once you decide which one to take on that vehicle, you cannot change in the future.

I’m probably not much help, but hope this does help you out some. Good Luck.

My family’s home was destroyed by a tornado last week. It was a family Home frome previous generations – paid for. Neither my husband nor I have ever bought a home before. We both rented before living in the now gone home. It’s in the country. We have the deed to the land the old home was on. What are the steps we need to go through to get a home? We will need a deep well, septic tank, bank loan, everything. Where do we go to know what to do first – bank first or call the well-driller and septic tank person? We really don’t know which way to get started.
We are hoping to be able to get a double wide mobile home to put on this land. The land is only one acre.
Unfortunately we have no insurance. The home we were in was an older model and couldn’t be insured. (Yeah, we got the luck!) So everything we do is going to have to be financed by the bank. We are literally starting from scratch. Savings has around a thousand in it.

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Now if you are just starting out in the internet marketing arena, I suggest taking a few baby steps and that means starting out with the Mining Money Online program that is taylored just for newbies in the affiliate marketing business and it comes at a price that every one can afford of $77

The first thing to do is decide if you are going to buy an existing home or have one built on the land you own. If you are buying an existing home you will need to obtain financing through a bank or mortgage company. Get pre-approved before looking for the home.Find a REALTOR that you are comfortable working with. Be sure to have the purchase of the home contingent on it passing an inspection.
If you will be building a home on the land you will still need to obtain the financing to construct the house. Before getting the loan you will need to find a REALTOR who works with new construction and have them help you find the builder for you. I could go much further but this will set you on the right path.

I want to remodel the outside of my Home with custom stone and different paint colors or cedar/wood looking siding. Need to see how different looks would affect the house using a picture of our house. Any ideas/websites would be appreciated lots.

Check out HGTV.com they even have a calculator to keep your project on budget! Best of luck with your project!

Can you keep the home buyer tax credit after selling your home and moving to a new home before the 3rd year?
Meaning: buying your first home this year and qualifying for the tax credit. Then, 1 or 2 years later, sell the home, and move to another home. Or are you stuck in the same Home for 3 years to avoid repaying the credit?

No. You must use the home as your primary residence for the full 3 years or else pay back the tax credit.

I’ll be looking to buy a house in the near future and I have heard some horror stories about people hiring a Home inspector to inspect the house they are wanting to buy, then come to find out that the home wasn’t properly inspected. When an inspector is looking over the house, are you allowed to walk around with them? Is there any way of finding out about certificates or anything positive about the home inspector, without having to ask them directly? I know there’s a lot of con artists out there in the open and even the cautious person can get burned in the long run. I just don’t want to buy a home after it’s been "supposdly" inspected, then have everything go wrong afterwards and cost me a fortune. Any help would be appreciated!

Good question, it is hard to know who you can rely on. I might suggest that you go to the link provided and see if the professional association can give you some hints and advice on what to do and or look for in an inspector
Home Inspectors Associations for all states: http://www.homeinspections-usa.com/home_inspector_orgs.php
Best of luck to you

Additional Details
Forgot to give you this one
What a home inspection looks at (voice tour)

http://www.ashi.org/customers/vhi_tour.asp

Basically I am planning to buy a home theater system with a DVD player but want to know if i can use that even without the DVD player. If i am just watching TV, is my Home theater system is used or sitting idle?

Depends on your home theater systems and if it allows additional hook -ups to it. If it does then there should be no problem hooking up your TV for surround sound.
But remember it will not sound as good as your DVDs because DVDs are digital or 5.1, normal TV signals are analog or 2.0 .
If your home theater had Dolby Pro Logic ll, it will convert the 2.0 signal to 5.1.

My mom has passed and left me her home, only problem is she had a reverse mortgage on the home. My fiancee and I live in the home and would like to stay in the Home. How do I keep the home?
Thank you for your answers, but isn’t their some kind of creative financing i can find?

Was the home paid off prior to the reverse mortgage? Do you have a decent amount in savings? If so you may be able to just pay back the reverse mortgae, if nto you’ll have to refi for whatever is left on the loan. Check out loanhomeonline.com/findamortgage. I dont have the best credit so had to shop around but taht site helped me find my b of a loan.

I am looking into starting my own home building business but am trying to work with some numbers, specifically the average profit that self employed home builders can expect to make.

For example, if you sell a home for £200,000 how much was spent on the actual construction of the Home and thus how much profit does the builder accrue?

Also how muhc would you have to spend for the basic electric, plumbing gas ect.

Profit can be great, could be anywhere between 10k to 100k or more.. No straight forward answer, depends on the size of the home, the area, the detail of the home, etc… But this market is real tough for home builders, many sell at cost just to get rid of the debt. And many have a lot of construction sites on hold, they just can’t sell the homes they already built so other projects are sitting around unfinished.
Also you need to consider making a name for yourself, sad fact is not many people are willing to hire a no-namer compay to build their home. And you don’t likely have a name in the business, if you did you’d know how estimates and profit works in the construction world.. No disrespect, just trying to help out.. good luck