First House Purchase

[Oneil Guntner]

Ventura County, California, has homes that are typically expensive for the young first time home buyers. There are multiple options to take and I wanted to seek other's opinions on this. There are some advantages and disadvantages to each situation. We could purchase a condo right now in the 250-300k that would be 2 bedrooms or a rare 3 bedroom in a semi-okay neighborhood but we feel comfortable living there since it's next to a lot of shopping centers and by my mother-in-law's house. I also have a one-year-old son so we take that into consideration but we have other parts of town we would not live in. This particular condo association covers water, sewer, and trash with the HOA that is $395/month. I work in property management so I will know how to look at their reserves to make sure that their reserves are at least somewhat in decent shape. We would be using an FHA loan and since I will be representing myself as the buyer and the broker is my Dad I will be rolling the full commission into the 3.5% down. This makes the downpayment very affordable and easy to accomplish when our lease ends. We are currently paying $1575/month plus utilities for a one-bedroom in a nice location. If we stay another year we would stay in the same location that we enjoy but move to the two-bedroom for $1,800/month plus utilities. The other option I'm weighing is to save up my money to use the power of an FHA loan to either buy a live-in flip or a duplex, triplex, quadplex which will become easier as I start earning more commissions and just live off my property management salary plus my partner's part-time job which helps cover her student loans and groceries. I'm guessing we would be able to get an extra 4-5 years of owning the condo and I can probably convince her to stay more years at the condo if we were working towards a goal of buying another property and that we would have more cash left over at the end of the month to still enjoy affordable fun activities.