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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Home hunting involves more than curb appeal

Jill Wagner

Molly and I celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary this week. We did so by taking a plunge that, in some ways, feels even bigger than marriage: We set time with a financial planner to help determine how much of a house we can afford to buy.

That’s right. Real estate. A mortgage. Property taxes. Water and garbage pick-up bills. Plumbing repairs and other fix-it expenses.

Can you tell I’m scared?

I’d do well, instead, to listen to our boys: A tree house. Their own bedrooms. Redoing the driveway so that we can put our hand- and footprints in the wet cement for our own little Walk of Fame.

Molly dreams of a sizable garden plot. I love the idea of a room of my own for a writing studio. We all long for a big, empty basement as the construction site of our Lego city.

My trepidation is fueled primarily by my own lifetime of thriftiness and unwillingness to be in debt. The recent mortgage crisis and tales of Spokane homeowners blindsided by huge increases in property taxes do nothing to relieve my worry.

We have two incomes, now, for the first time in our three years of being a family, which makes it possible to even consider buying a home. But will a mortgage in both our names be wise? Federal tax law is pretty much focused on all things heterosexual when it comes to granting benefits to couples. Molly has the boys as dependents for a tax write-off. Should I have the interest on a mortgage?

Long in my bookmarks on my Web browser, but not explored thoroughly until now, Queercents ( www.queercents.com) has been a great site these past couple of weeks for easing my mind. Beginning with its tagline, I love the sense the site fosters that being smart with money doesn’t mean being cheap: “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping without coupons.”

A syndicate of personal finance writers posts information specifically for the LGBT community on topics such as real estate, mortgages, investing, bargains and deals, credit cards, HIV and finance, aging and finance. The jargon is accessible, without being overly generalized for us non-finance folk.

In an entry on mortgages, the advice is to stick with a 30-year fixed loan. The writer goes on to define some of the other “sexier, trendier, more exotic residential mortgages” and how they have led buyers into a quagmire of debt.

For example, the simple note that diving into one of those imminently attractive, no-money-down loans means you move into a home with absolutely no equity did much to convince me of the reliability of those “old-fashioned fixed rate loans.”

As part of this process, we’ve looked at one house. It had fantastic curb appeal and our 10-year-old picked out his room within minutes. For us, though, once inside, the shoddy construction was immediately visible.

Back in our apartment, seated around the dinner table, we explained that searching for just the right home will take time, maybe many months.

Our youngest, who had been so excited, seemed to understand. “Besides,” he said, “there was no tree in the back yard.”

Jill Wagner’s column about the region’s gay community appears weekly. She can be reached at outonthetown7@yahoo.com.