A lovely reader asked me recently how to best budget for a home improvement project. She is in the middle of dealing with the garage addition to her property she wanted to know if early financial surprises in the project would be an indication of later pocketbook misfortune. Well it turns out I happen to …
“Dear Steve, 3 yrs. ago, I bought the house that I had rented for 14 yrs. It was a real fixer-uper. I borrowed aprox. 20k extra with my original motgage and also ran up another 10k on credit cards to remodel the inlaw aprt. downstairs. I then refinanced, paid off the credit cards, and took …
“Dear Steve, We just bought a house six months ago and own $229,000 on it. We owe almost $35,000 in credit card bills and recently my full time job went to part time, so I am earning less than half of what I did a couple of months ago. Since we just bought our house …
“Dear Steve, My wife and I would like to make about $60 K worth of improvements to our house. The problem is, the house right now (with improvements over time that we’ve made) is already worth $11 K less than the maximum selling price it would fetch on the current market. We don’t necessarily improve …