The Expenses of Buying a House (with REAL numbers!) + House Tour

A couple of months ago, my wife and I purchased our first house, which proved to be both exciting and eye-opening. So, being a personal finance blogger and youtuber, I thought I’d go through all of the various expenses associated with just buying a house - but first, let me take you on a tour of our place.
Homebuying series: fioney.com/?s=Lessons+From+a+...
So now let me quickly break down the expenses associated with buying this home. First, we ended up paying $220,000 for the house - and , since we put 20% down, that worked out to $44,000.
Starting with fees that I actually understand and two that we could have paid at closing but actually just paid ahead of time, there was the inspection and the appraisal. For the inspection, we chose to have them check for mold, radon, and termites in addition to their regular inspection, so it came to $850 before an unfortunate 3% credit card fee. Meanwhile the appraisal fee was $585.
Next, we have my new favorite oxymoron: discount fee. Since interest rates are high and we bought a couple of month ago when they were even higher, we ended up “buying points” on our loan, meaning that we paid a small amount up front to have our interest rate slightly lowered - and i do mean slightly. Thus, the $172 fee took our interest rate down to a mere 7.999
Rather than go line by line through the rest, I’m just going to show you the numbers on the screen in sections, starting with these various services. The one I’m most curious about there is the processing fee as it was the largest expense in this section..
Then there’s the titling services that came out to be almost $1,100 in total and, again, i dont really know what these mean.
The next section I understand a bit more as it’s represents some prepayments we needed to make as far as paying for a year of insurance and taxes upfront as well as loading initial funds into our escrow account. There was also prepaying interest from our closing date to the first of the next month.
Lasly, there was this $337 Owner’s Title Policy fee that says optional next to it that I guess I paid.
In total, our closing costs came to $5,878.72 on top of our 44,000 down payment. Meanwhile, while our interest and principal payments total $1,291.30 per month, our mortgage payments with estimated escrow will be $1,455. The first one was due on January 1st, so it’s a good thing we paid it!
Anyway, I hope you found this dive into the real expense of buying a home interesting and if we want to read more about what I learned in the process such as why an Apple Card could mess with your mortgage application or the various spam you get after buying a house, I’ll have links to my new homebuying series on Fioney in the description box down below.
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So thanks again for watching and I’ll see you next time here on Fioney.
#homebuying #firsttimehomebuyer #fioney