Are you thinking of buying a fixer upper? We just did! We aren’t builders in any way, but we did know that there are a few items that we definitely needed to inspect and look out for when buying our fixer upper. Here are the things you should look for:

10 Details to Check when Buying a Fixer Upper

Major structural damage falls into the category of “Don’t buy this house!” bad. Some structural damage is so bad that the entire house will need to be destroyed! Unless you are shopping for land, this is a pretty hefty problem.

When buying a fixer upper, you definitely want an inspector to come in and check out the structure of the home. They will look for cracks in the foundation, unevenness, issues with grading, and other potential structural issues. Most of these things can’t be solved with simple DIY enthusiasm.

The Bad

Wood Issues

Pretty much every house I’ve ever see has a wooden frame of some sort, and it’s incredibly important to make sure this wood is in good condition before you buy. The major issues you will see with wood are termites and rot. These things can either be bad or “Don’t buy this house bad” depending upon how far the problem has spread.

Termites

I highly recommend hiring a pest inspector prior to finalizing the purchase on any fixer upper. An active infestation can cause thousands of dollars of damage, and can be costly to eradicate. The house we are buying does have some slight termite damage from about twenty years ago, but the infestation was eradicated quickly and there are no further signs of an active infestation. We will continue to have the house treated and inspected on a yearly basis to ensure they don’t come back. We will also slowly replace the damaged pieces.

Rot

Rotting wood is the second big wood problem you need to look for when buying a fixer upper. Wood rot is generally caused by moisture, so if there is rot on the inside structure, you know that water is coming in from somewhere (generally not a good thing). Wood rot on the frame of the house could lead to devastating structural issues. You can check out this blog post on wood rot for more information on how to find (and treat!) it.  

Safety Issues

Buying a fixer upper can be a super fun challenge, but we don’t want to do something that’s potentially dangerous. Therefore, you really need to check for safety concerns before you buy. Check for structural hazards such as weak floors “Don’t buy this house bad”, loose fixtures, and random old holes (seriously, most of the houses we looked at had random holes in the floor from old heating systems or whatever).

Electrical/Fire hazards

Electrical hazards are the most concerning safety hazard. Not only can they shock you, but they can also cause fires. Have your inspector check the grounding and the wiring to the best extent possible. Some older homes may need a complete rewire, which can get incredibly expensive. It’s also not something that you should try doing yourself, unless you are a trained electrician.  

Toxins and Chemicals

Toxins and chemicals are also a safety concern, though they usually can be mitigated. If you have little kids, make sure that you get the lead paint test. Most older houses do have lead paint, but as long as no one eats it or inhales it you should be perfectly safe.  You should also check for radon gas and black mold, as exposure to both can be incredibly toxic. These problems can usually be mitigated, but you definitely want to know what you are getting into before you buy.

Leaks/Water Damage

You need to inspect every portion of the house for water damage, because you never know where there might be a leaky pipe. There is some slight water damage on the living room wall in the house we are buying, and we identified its source as the second bathroom that was incorrectly added. We surveyed the extent of the damage, and it didn’t look like the water damage led to any problems with the wood. These are things that you definitely need to be aware of before you buy!

 

 

The Good

And by good, I mean things that actually aren’t a huge deal but will make others pass on the home. There are tons of small issues that will prevent people who don’t want to do anything from buying a house, but that will make it a fixer uppers dream!

Carpet

Ugly carpet is kind of a big deal in central Pennsylvania. Pretty much every house we looked at had some type of ugly, stinky carpet. But bad carpet isn’t a big deal! Replacing a carpet is an easy, low cost way to greatly improve the feel of an entire room. You can even change the carpet to hard wood or vinyl. It will basically be a clean slate for you.

Paint/wallpaper

Wall décor is another cosmetic issue that can make a house look terrible. Everyone has different tastes, and the majority of people selling homes in central PA have horrible taste in wallpaper. I wish they had awful taste in paint, as that’s far easier to fix! But ugly wallpaper isn’t a deal breaker. It’s harder to remove, but it’s not a major problem with the home. Don’t look past a fixer upper because the walls are ugly.

Dated

The fun part of buying a fixer upper is renovating a dated room for modern use! You may run into all sorts of old features such as seventies shag carpet, fifties appliances, and closed off rooms (I read somewhere that it was improper to have guests see your kitchen back in the day, is that true?). Making an older home shine with modern glory is the absolute best part of buying a fixer upper. I’m excited to make that happen!

Minor Fixes

If you want to pass on a home because of minor issues, you probably shouldn’t be buying a fixer upper. There are tons of small things that can be wrong with any house, labeled DIY or not. Some have creaky stairs, leaky faucets, or windows that stick. Others have small holes in the drywall or missing outlet covers. Homes with a lot of these issues may fall under a fixer upper, but they are easy to fix so don’t look past a home because of these defects. It will be fun to stretch out your DIY muscles with these easy smaller tasks!

What else?

For those of you who have been in the fixer upper game before, what are some other major things that you should check out before committing to a fixer upper? What do you wish you would have done differently?

I’m buying my third house! But this time, I’m doing something a bit different (and kind of scary!). Instead of buying a completely updated ready to live in home, we are buying a fixer upper!

Why would we want to buy a fixer upper?

We decided to buy a fixer upper this time around because we didn’t want to have another mortgage. I’m already paying over $1200 a month on the Georgia house (though I’m renting it out now, so I can call that an investment!) and I didn’t want to add to the debt load. We also both thought it would be great fun to learn some DIY skills and make the home our own. Be on the lookout for a YouTube series about it!

The financial perks of buying a fixer upper

Buying a fixer upper can be a great financial decision. In our new market, property values aren’t very high to begin with, so you can find an amazing house for a super low price if don’t mind doing some work. We are buying a giant 4-bedroom Victorian style home for just over $50K! You can’t get that kind of deal in most areas (though to be fair, no one really wants to buy a house in this area). Buying a fixer upper in inflated real estate markets can also be a great idea. You can get a house with great potential for an amazing bargain! It’s definitely a great way to get the type of house you want without having to pay top dollar.

The Costs of Buying a Fixer Upper

Nothing is without its downsides. The biggest issue with buying a fixer upper is that you actually have to fix it up! You can either hire contractors to make the needed renovations, which can get crazy expensive, or you can opt to do most of the work yourself.

Brian and I are going to try to do the majority of the work ourselves and document it all on YouTube (and here, of course!) so you can see where we fail and how we succeed. However, we’ve already decided that we are going to leave anything potentially dangerous or that could cause major issues to the professionals (mostly electrical and major plumbing issues). We don’t want to make anything worse!

Thinking of Buying a Fixer Upper?

Resale Value

There are a few things that you need to take into consideration if you are thinking of buying a fixer upper. First, is the resale value.  Look at the cost of renovation versus the potential resale value of the home. The housing market in Central Pennsylvania is not good. There aren’t a lot of nice homes on the market, and the ones available don’t sell for more than $115k. If we can stick to a renovation budget of $30K, we might be able to make an additional $30K when we eventually sell it. Because of these tight margins, we have to be very careful about the amount of money we put into it. We don’t want to put so much money in that we can’t recoup it when we do eventually sell.

 

 

Potential Rent

Some people buy fixer uppers with the intent to fix them then rent them out. This is a great option for building your real estate investment portfolio. However, you do need to make sure that the rental market in your area is worth the hassle. Do you want to do all that work to fix up a house to make a net of $100 per month? Probably not. Look at all of your costs (purchase price, potential mortgage payment, and renovation costs) and compare those to the potential monthly rental income to get an idea of whether this would be a good option. It could work really well in some markets, but could be a money pit in others.

What you want

Although the money parts (resale or rent) are important considerations, they not the only considerations. We plan on living in this house for a long time (and hey, maybe property values will increase some day!) so we do want to make it our own. We don’t want to get too excessive with the renovation costs, but we also want to build a home that works for our needs (a great thing about a fixer upper is that we have the ability to do that!). Our goal is to make the house a home.

If you are buying a fixer upper with the intent to live in it, deciding on what you want is the most important part. If you plan on living there for a long time, making it your own is more important than the resale value or potential rent.

What was your experience with buying a fixer upper?

Have you every considered buying a fixer upper? How did it turn out? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments!

Yep, you read that right. Partner’s in Fire is doing a No Spend Year! Ok, so maybe the catchy headline is a tad bit misleading. Maybe we should call it a “No Frivolous Spend Year”. That doesn’t sound nearly as exciting though, does it?

What a No Spend Year means to us

The main point of our no spend year is to stay away from unnecessary spending all year. Our goals are to pay off our debt and recoup our savings. We also decided now, in January, what we will be spending money on this year, and the challenge is to not deviate from that decision, for the whole entire year!

What we Can Spend Money on this Year

Obviously, it’s impossible to go an entire year without spending any money. We need to eat, we need to live somewhere, we need utilities, and we need to drive to work. We also aren’t complete fuddy duddies, so we need to have a bit of fun. The important thing is to decide now what that fun will be and to not deviate from it.

Mandatory spending

We’ve all got bills to pay. Our mandatory spending this year is the same as it will be every year. We need to pay our taxes, utilities, gas, and food. This mandatory spending category covers all of our monthly bills. This is what we will spend each month on bills:

 

Taxes PA house	150
Home insurance PA House	100
Georgia house mortgage	1200
Georgia house maintenance	200
HBs Car	300
Stupid Decision Car	300
Car Insurance (all three cars)	300
Phones	300
Utilities	300
Groceries	800
Total Monthly Bills	3950

 

4k per month seems like an awful lot, but remember we are renting our house in Georgia out, so the tenets are paying the costs of that, and sometimes my ex pays for the stupid decision car and insurance (though not always). Also, these bills are for two people, four cats, and two giant dogs (hence the slightly high grocery bill).

New House Spending

Our biggest purchase during our no spend year is undoubtedly the new house in Pennsylvania. We are paying cash, so it’s going to wipe out the majority of our cash holdings (reason number one why rebuilding that this year is of utmost importance!). The house itself was a steal – 52K for a huge Victorian Style home. It’s a fixer upper, so we will need to put some money into renovations this year. We just got the inspection completed, and there don’t seem to be any major problems that make the home unsafe or unlivable, but there are a lot of cosmetic problems and a few things that will cause major problems down the road if they aren’t addressed soon. We are expecting the renovations to cost about 20K.

On the plus side, we thing that if we put that money into the home and make it nice, we will greatly increase the value, and we will most likely make money on it when we decide to resell it. We are also going to save money by doing a lot of the renovations ourselves!

Visits

We aren’t going to be total fuddy duddies during our no spend year. We’ve already decided that we will take two trips this year – one to Los Angeles to visit my friends and family, and another to Savannah to visit his. Both of those locations offer us free places to stay, and we can drive to Savannah to save even more money.

We decided that we can budget some money for these trips this year because personal relationships are the most important things in the world, and we don’t want to lose sight of that while trying to save money.

Fun

We are going to severely limit the amount of money that we spend on having fun this year, but we can’t have zero fun. Therefore, we decided to talk now about what are “fun” spending will be. Brian really loves video games, and he’s going to go back to streaming on Twitch as soon as we get settled into the new house. So, we decided that he can buy four new video games over the course of the year. This isn’t a lot at all for an active gamer, but he’s willing to make the huge sacrifice to ensure that we get all our stuff paid off.

We are also going to buy a Nintendo 64 and some of the old school games (especially Mario 64!). This console will provide us with hours of inside the house entertainment, so we won’t be crazy bored.

The final fun spending thing that we are allowing ourselves this year is a few day trips. We are definitely going to take Brian’s daughter to the Hershey theme park and Philadelphia, but we are also considering heading to New York City or Boston for a quick get-away. We want to take advantage of all the awesome stuff that super close to our new location!

Eating Out

Ok, we are realists. We know that it’s basically impossible to not eat out for an entire freaking year. That’s just not going to happen. Therefore, we allowed ourselves two nights a month for eating whatever we want. The BF really sucks at not eating out, so this is going to be a huge struggle for him. Getting him to bring a lunch to work every day rather than go to whatever fast food place is closest is going to be a huge struggle for me. But I think we will get there.

What we Can’t Spend Money on this Year

Travel

Travel is one of my biggest budget busters. I’ve been on at least one international trip every year for the past five years. I’ve spent close to ten grand every year on it! I love to travel, to explore new cities, foods, and cultures, so this limitation is going to be really hard on me. But it will be worth it to ensure that I’ll have the opportunity to travel even more in the years to come.

Shopping

No new clothes, no new shoes, no new toys. This is going to be rough for both of us! The majority of our unnecessary spending has been on frivolous stuff that we find at malls (who remembers the crappy Zelda chest from My Boyfriend Sucks with Money?). If we are going to succeed at this no spend year and achieve our budget goals, we need to totally eliminate this type of spending. It will be easier for me than for him, but hopefully giving him the four games will help. It’s going to be a rough year!

Eating out

Yes, we are giving ourselves a little leeway here, but for the most part our no spend year includes no eating out. That means bag lunches, dinners at home, and learning how to cook. Thankfully I have the Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle which will help me plan out or meals and learn how to cook tasty delicious meals. Maybe we can even start cooking as a couple’s activity! That would be fun!

 

Going Out

I’m a homebody, so this is way easier for me. But the BF loves going out to bars for tasty adult beverages. This is a huge budget buster! One tasty adult beverage costs almost eight bucks! And who (other than me) has just one? One night on the town can easily cost over fifty bucks, and that’s just unnecessary.

We are also going to severely limit other types of going out. Movies, bowling, mini-golf, arcades, coffee shops, malls, and anything else entertaining are all on our no-no list. Sure, we may do one or two of these things this year, but they will be few and far between. Instead, we will have free fun at parks, hiking trails, and at home.

Who’s with me?

So who is with me on the No Spend Year Challenge? Lets all work together and keep each other accountable for sticking to our plans! We can do it!

I’m super excited about 2019! I just moved to a new state and started a new job, so 2019 is basically the start of a brand-new journey. I definitely took these challenges into consideration when thinking about what my goals for 2019 should be! A lot of thought went into this, especially after failing at most of my 2018 goals. I still want to achieve most of those things, but I also realized that I need to be a bit more realistic.

Goals for 2019

Personal Goals

Be Happy!

My most important personal goal for 2019 is to just be happy. It’s not always easy. Life can be hard sometimes (especially right now, when we are renting a small room an hour away from work, don’t have all of our babies with us, and don’t know when our next paycheck is coming due to forces outside of our control). But my goal is to try to remain positive. This rough patch will pass, and 2019 is going to be an amazing year.

Healthy Eating

Healthy eating is one of my top goals for 2019, as it was for 2018. However, after the first two months of 2018, I totally failed at it. This year, I have an amazing plan to stick with it for the entirety of 2019 and beyond: The Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle. It’s an amazing product that has over a thousand dollars’ worth of recipes, e-books, meal planning, and e-courses for only $37! This all in one bundle makes it super easy to stick to your healthy eating goal for this new year. You can read my blog post about it here, or you can just check out the website for yourself! With the ultimate bundle’s help, I’m not going to fail at healthy eating this year.

 

Buying and renovating a House

Since I just moved to a new location, I have to buy a new house (no one rents to crazy cat people, such a shame). The area that I moved to has tons of options for cheap houses – but most need a bit of work. I’m ok with that though! It’s always been a dream of mine to renovate a home, and the property values in this area will make that dream a reality. In fact, we just put in an offer for an amazing Victorian style fixer upper, so keep your fingers crossed for us!

Maintaining our relationship

I feel kind of weird about putting this out there as a goal for 2019…I mean we all know what happened last year. The key difference this year though is that I actually want to achieve it. I love my boyfriend with all my heart and I’ve never felt so supported and loved in a relationship. And, he didn’t make me put this! I don’t feel like our relationship at this point needs a lot of work, but I also don’t want to get complacent. I want to show him how much I appreciate him every day. And maybe, by this time next year, my goal will be to maintain our marriage.

Money Goals

I learned last year that you should never ever have net worth goals based on the potential performance of the stock market. That was an epic fail! So, my money goals for 2019 are things that are more within my control.

Debt repayment

My number one money goal for 2019 is to get my credit card paid off. I wrote a guest post on Arrest Your Debt late last year about getting myself into a credit card hole, and I’ve been working hard to get it paid off. Unfortunately, with moving expenses and a car repair, I’ve had to increase my credit card debt in the past few weeks.  This year, my credit card debt is going to be my top focus. If all goes well, I should have it paid off by April.

Build up Cash

I’m basically wiping out all of my cash holdings to buy a new house (but hey, I’m going be mortgage free!). So, my next goal of 2019 is to rebuild my cash holdings. This actually shouldn’t be that difficult without the mortgage payment. My goal is to rebuild twenty thousand dollars’ worth of emergency savings by the end of the calendar year. That’s a lot, but I definitely think it’s doable!

Maintain my Investments

I’m not going to change my investment allocations for the new year, so this should be an exceedingly easy goal to achieve. I’m going to keep investing in my 401K at a rate of 6% (and getting the match) and I’m going to continue investing my $100 a month into my Vanguard account. Easy Peasy!

Blog Goals

Increase readership

I still have yet to hit 1000 users in any given month on my blog organically. My number one blog goal of 2019 is to reach achieve this. I’ve been so close in recent months that I definitely think it’s achievable (maybe even this month!!). My next readership goal is way more ambitious. I want to get to 25k users a month so that I can join Mediavine’s ad network. I don’t know if that’s going to be achievable in 2019, but I’m going to go for it!

Make some money!

My second blog goal for 2019 is to make some money! I love blogging because I love to write and I love offering valuable information to my readers. But it would be nice to get some compensation for it. I think last year’s goal of 1100 was really ambitious for a brand-new blog, but I don’t think it’s out of reach for a blog that’s been around the block for a year. I’m going to keep that as my goal, and I’m going to achieve it! You can help me out by shopping at Amazon through my affiliate link(hint hint wink wink).

Social Media Goals

I failed at pretty much all of my social media goals last year, but that’s ok! I’m just going to have the same goals for this year! I can definitely get to 5000 twitter followers by the end of the year (I’m only 1500 away, so I should be able to get there by March!). I’ve finally figured out that it’s pretty easy to gain followers on Pinterest just by following others (I know, rocket science, right?) so I should be able to get to 5000 on there this year as well.

My goals for Facebook and Instagram are a little different this year. I’d love to gain more followers on both platforms, but I’d rather focus on building a better community. Therefore, my goal on those platforms is to share more meaningful content rather than to build a following. If I keep sharing interesting, engaging content, the followers will come. And they will be engaged, which is way more important.

Travels Near and Far

As you can see, my goals for 2019 have kind of excluded my other website, Travels Near and Far. I realized last year that it’s just way too much to work full time and to run two blogs. Therefore, my focus is going to continue to be Partner in Fire, and I’ll just maintain the Instagram account for Travels. When I achieve financial independence, I’ll go back to travels near and far and make it as amazing as this blog is.

Your goals

What does 2019 have in store for you? What are your New Year’s Goals? Let’s partner together and help each other achieve all of our goals for 2019.

Happy New Year! Are you ready to start this year off right? So am I! So, as is tradition, we’ve established some great new year’s goals for 2019. I’m going to keep you in suspense on most of them so we can focus one that is incredibly important: Healthy Eating.

Healthy Eating for 2019

Last year, my new year’s goal was just to lose weight. I practically starved myself during the last two weeks of my challenge, but I did lose 20 pounds! Which I promptly gained back as soon as the challenge was over.

The thing is, making your goal to lose weight doesn’t work. You try fad diets and go no carb for a few weeks, and yeah the pounds melt off but its not sustainable. I love food, there is no freaking way I’m sticking to any type of diet that is going to limit me. I need a way to incorporate healthy eating into my regular schedule.

That’s why I’m so thankful that I found the Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle. It has an entire year’s worth of meal planning and recipes for every type of diet. And they even have snack and dessert recipes! We all know I wouldn’t survive without snacks and desserts. I mean, what kind of life is that?

Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle

But the great thing about the Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle is that it includes so much more than recipes. I mean, I could troll recipes.com if that’s all I was interested in (though I do have a really hard time finding good recipes there unless I know exactly what I want to cook and need a recipe, which rarely happens. Do people really scroll through online recipe databases to get meal ideas?). Anyway, the Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle is way better than that. It offers thirty different meal plans for tons of different scenarios – from vegetarian meals to kid’s meals, crock pot meals to quick meals, and even for party hosting and themed meals. It also has meal plans for meal prepping and for frugal eating! There are plenty of meal plans for everyone no matter what they are into! It’s freaking amazing!

The Best Part

But my favorite part of the Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle is the courses – specifically the Flavor Crash Course by Courtney Polivka. This course teaches you how to cook without having to rely on recipes! It teaches you how to craft your own culinary masterpieces by learning about different flavor profiles. It also shows you how to combine ingredients for the most flavorful results. This is an amazing course for people (like me) who are clueless about cooking. This course alone costs $200, so even if you buy the bundle just for this course you are getting an amazing freaking deal! It’s only $37 dollars for the entire bundle!!

This Deal Doesn’t Last

The one negative thing about the Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle is that this deal is only available for a very short time. You have to act now to get access to all the awesomeness in this bundle! After January 7, this deal goes away for good! But wait, there’s more! (I’ve always wanted to say that!). If you purchase the bundle before January 4^th, you gain access to the 30 meals in 30 days challenge. This early bird special is a great way to get into the habit of preparing healthy meals right away – as they say, it takes 30 days to make a habit.

 

Lets start this New Year Off Right!

So who is with me on starting this New Year off right with an awesome Healthy Eating Ultimate Bundle? Click here to purchase your bundle today for only thirty-seven dollars. You don’t want to miss this amazing value!. It’s a great way to get your year off to an amazing start.