I remember when you were a regular poster, and then you weren’t. Welcome back!
Another interim measure to consider that relies more on luck and timing (which we had when we sold our last place): See if you’re able to rent back your current place from the buyers while waiting on the new place. It’s not always a possibility, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. When we sold our last house, my husband had already relocated and our daughter moved to her college town, leaving me with the house and 2 dogs while waiting for my transfer to finalize. Finding temp housing with the dogs would have been a challenge.
As it happened, the buyers were living with their parents and they were willing to let me stay for the time I needed to get everything done and moved. I cleared part of the house so they could start moving their stuff in, making it clear to the moving crew that they shouldn’t touch any of it. Then when my transfer date got there, I packed my critters in my van with the last of my stuff and off I went.
Obviously, all the circumstances have to be just right for this to work, but since I was paying their mortgage for the time I stayed there, it worked out for both of us. So just something to keep in the back of your mind. Good luck!!
Thanks everyone for the kind welcome back. I do know our neighborhood is apparently a hot commodity just by watching homes go up on sale and immediately be SOLD. Plus the community I would most like to move to sells out SO FAST even before all this. I remember we saw a house we liked on Friday, made an appointment to see it on Saturday, but by then someone had already made an offer on it, without seeing it or inspecting it or anything. Weird.
When we bought in NJ we let the sellers do this, since we were on a month to month lease about 1/2 mile away. (They were building a new house and it was delayed.) If you do this, you should see a lawyer, since renting gives the tenants certain rights. We didn’t officially rent the house to them - we delayed the closing with a penalty that increased with time, all things that they were fine with. It’s a good solution but the new owner should be careful. In our case it worked out just fine.
Best advice ever right here… took a few moves for that to sink in for younger me.
The downside to doing THAT is that you’ve taken out that huge mortgage - and assuming it’s a fixed rate mortgage, paying down the principal won’t reduce your payment. If you can afford the higher payment long term, that’s cool - you’ll pay it down that much faster, shaving years off the new mortgage.
Rentbacks are pretty common in housing sales. When we last moved (19 years ago!!), we rented back from the people who bought the townhouse, and the people who sold the new house to us rented back from us. In both cases it was a matter of a week or two though, not longer term. As it happens, this was during a similar housing bubble - our townhouse sold for 16,000 more than list; we paid slightly less than asking price for the house we moved to but that was because the sellers had had a sale fall through and needed to make the sale happen.
A friend of mine was downsizing a few years ago - selling her townhouse and moving to a condo closer to her job. She offered a bonus to the selling agent if the deal on the sale close in time to avoid the need for a bridge loan, but that was her fallback if the timing didn’t work out. It did, though just barely.
If you are indeed looking at a longer time between selling and buying, you can do a short-term rental (apartment or whatever) for a few months, which would reduce some of the time pressure - but there’s no predicting when the bubble might burst. A year from now, it may have slowed down enough that you can actually buy a new place with less insanity involved - of course who knows what interest rates will be then?
And there are the logistics of a longer-term rental - not sure if kids are in the picture but school changes would add an extra level of hassle. You could deal with a mile or two more or less on your daily commute, but changing schools twice would be rough on the kids.
Oh - and welcome back, Meeks!!!