Buying A Home
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
vacation homes
DH and I are considering buying a vacation home or condo in the ski areas of Colorado. We are looking near Copper Mountain or maybe the town of Frisco or Dillon. We are not sure yet if we want to be ski-in/ski-out or get more house for our money a bit further away. We would plan on renting it out when we are not using it but the income would not be necessary for us in order to afford it. We are fairly clueless about vacation homes in general. Anyone have any input or advice about this process?
Re: vacation homes
Advice? Yes: don't.
How often are you really skiing? Are you skiing enough to greatly exceed the cost of renting a place for your family? How easy is it for your family to get to this location for an impromptu getaway?
MIL inherited a beach house free & clear. The expenses on it every year run $5k. It's not actually on the beach, but a mile away from a very nice, very secluded public beach.
Because it is 6 hours from ILs', 8 hours from us, 6 hours from UIL, it just doesn't get used that often. You can't hop in the car for a weekend when you've got to drive 6-8 hours to get there. And forget visiting on a holiday weekend - the rest of the nation has the same idea and the drive takes 8-10 hours instead. Then once you get there after a long road trip, you have to find the water valve in the flower beds out front and turn it on, unlock the house and turn the AC and wait hours for the house to cool down, schlep in a weekend's worth of groceries, then you can sit down for a sec. When it's time to leave, you have to do a houseful of laundry, clean the whole house top to bottom, shut the house up, and go dig through the flower bushes again to turn off the water. Visiting the house is just a hassle if you're going to be there for less than a week.
On top of the general petty annoyances of opening and closing a house, there are the very real maintenance issues. Vacation properties don't have less maintenance because they're used less - they're aging the same days, months, and years as any other real estate. Roofs leak, decks need staining, hot water heaters need replacing, and on and on. This is another area where being close is a factor - are you going to drive up in the summer to check on it to make repairs? Do you want to make that X hours drive when it's not ski season?
Because our house isn't directly on the beach, renters are few and far between. Will you be able to get renters if you're not right beside the slopes? And when they're there, there are maintenance issues again. Who's cleaning the property between renters or are you trusting them to do it properly? If they break something, who do they call and who goes after them to get money for that broken thing? Are you going to pay a PM company to manage the house? Will the PM company do a good job or will you end up with a lousy one? You have to worry about burst pipes during the winter if someone doesn't set the thermostat correctly.
So examine the REAL ownership costs: remember you have to keep all the utilities on year-round, plus cable tv (and internet if you want it), plus insurance, plus maintenance. Is it worth it? ILs could go to Europe twice a year for what they spend on the beach house. They're only waiting on the market to recover before they sell.
ETA - I thought of one more thing. How much do you love this location? Because since it's already paid for, you'll feel obligated to go there all the time. Will you get bored of exclusively going there for a couple years?
ETA2 - Don't forget the initial set-up costs of decorating & furnishing a home.
My Pinterest
The Googlesites Paint Bio
Thinking of doing cosmetic updates to a dated home? These were our costs.
This would be my reason not to get a vacation home. All of Tar's other points are very valid too. I would not want to be chained to one vacation spot for the rest of my life. However, I'm the type of person who wants to see the world, and you may not be.
I agree with Tarheels post.
My parents go to Puerto Rico every winter for 2 months. They rent a condo. Their reasoning is this...if they decide they no longer want to go, they have to do NOTHING. If a storm hits when they are not there they have to do NOTHING.
The costs for them going each year are far less than what it would cost them to own a place.
My grandparents have a summer home - they live 9 hours away from it. One issue that has been a recurring problem is people trespassing/vandalzing/stealing.
They've had windows broken, a few tools stolen, and someone even went #2 in their water tank.
The longer a property sits vacant the more likely it is to attract vandals and theives.
My parents have wrestled with this a lot. They've shopped several times over the years and made a number of (lowball) offers on places. The beach town they're shopping in is only an hour from their home, though, so that eases a number of THR's concerns.
The two big reasons why they are only 90-some% into it is the maintenance concerns (they have a pretty high maintenance primary house), and feeling tied into always vacationing there. We've gone there annually since before I could walk (renting a place for 2 weeks every summer) but we also like to take vacations to other places too. My mom's afraid they'll feel inhibited about that if they owned a beach house. (My dad, who hates to fly, loves the idea.)
My parents also inherited a vacation home. The upsides: it has 50 feet of waterfront with no public access, it's deep enough for boat docking, yet shallow enough for swimming, it's on a bay, so the water is usually calm, it's winterized, with a real foundation, insulation, heat, etc, it was just over 200 miles from their primary home.
The downsides: no water (they ended up putting in a well, the only water line was lake water when it was a summer house), no storage (ended up building an attached tool shed), HOA fees, taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenence. Most weekends between April and October, they would travel there, which limited their ability to do other things in the summer. (My mother, my brother and I would also stay there most of the summer when we were younger and my mother only worked during the school year, while my dad came up on weekends.)
They were very, very eager to sell their primary home and downsize into only one house when I graduated from high school. The property belonged to my mom's grandparents, and since it's waterfront, that's the location they chose.
I would say that it would be an okay idea if you ARE using it for investment. If you are going to be renting it and using a property company to do so, it might work out for you. But maybe not.
40/112
we're considering a condo up in the mountains down the road as well (first got to buy and pay off a good chunk of our primary resident!) but, we live in CO and it would be our weekend house - so we'd be there frequently.
One thing to note - while the prices of condos up there seem very reasonable (I've seen good ones for under 200K), there are often HOA fees of about $500/mo. You might be in a financial position not to care, but just an FYI.