Don’t sell your house, make it a rent!

Instead of selling your residence to buy another home, you can decide not to sell your residence and convert it to rental property. In this case, the next home you buy and live in again qualifies you for the lowest owner-occupied loan rate. This approach also makes it easier to make repairs to the rental home because having lived there, you already know the tricks of how to fix things that normally need repair.

One system I use is to refinance my residence about a year before I plan to purchase a new residence. This gives me enough money for a down payment on the next house I will buy. When I find a good repairman, I can buy it quickly. During the 3-4 weeks it takes to close the new house, I prepare the old house so that it is ready to rent. This usually involves some painting and landscaping. Then, before closing the new house, the “for rent” sign appears on the old house.

The 3 steps of this technique:

1.) refinance your residence.

2.) Use the money from the refinance as a down payment to buy a new home.

3.) moving into the new house and renting the old one

With this technique, you get the lowest “primary residence” interest rate for both your old and new property, since each property is your primary residence at the time you apply for the loan.

When I did my first refinance on a townhome I owned, I received a rate of 6.1%. The rate on my original loan was 7.5%. The original purchase price was $ 52,500, but the value had increased to $ 82,000 ten years later. He had also paid about $ 10,000 of the principal on the mortgage over the course of the ten years.

When refinancing, you should keep 20 percent of the home’s value in the home to avoid paying for private mortgage insurance and paying a lower interest rate. After refinancing the townhome, my monthly mortgage payments dropped from $ 535 per month to $ 518 per month, even after taking just under $ 20,000 for a down payment on the next home I bought.