Another buying vs renting conundrum, please help! personalfinance

My boyfriend and I (both 23 years old) have been stressing over if we should buy or rent this year when our current lease is up. Our combined income is $7,000 a month which will be increasing by $500 in June when I get a raise. My boyfriend just recently paid off all of his student loans, which absolved us of all our debts. We have no car payments, or credit card debts to pay off.

At the moment we are living in a 2 floor apartment for $2500 a month (not including utilities). We have one roommate. Collectively my boyfriend and I pay $1800 towards rent. I'm not sure what my boyfriends bank accounts look like but I imagine they are pretty similar to mine (since we started working around the same time last year). I have $16,000 in my checking account, $4,000 in savings and $5,600 in a fixed term IRA (he probably doesn't have an IRA).

A house in our area was put up for sale at $349,000 in the summer of 2014. It's still on the market and they reduced the price to $339,000. It's a newly renovated cape cod. The only thing that was not updated was the roof which will have to be replaced in about 5 years. The taxes on the house are estimated at $7,000. My parents have offered to put a down payment of $100,000 on the house should we choose to buy. We would be responsible for paying the mortgage, insurance, and taxes as well as any maintenance the property needs. Right off the bat we would have to buy a refrigerator, washer and dryer for the newly renovated home. My parents are also convinced that if we made an offer of $300,000 the sellers would accept it, since it's a stale listing.

That would make the mortgage loan $200,000. Assuming a 4% interest rate, our monthly payments would be around $2,000 (for a 15 year mortgage, including taxes and insurance).

I guess my main questions are:

• Are the above calculations correct on monthly payments?


• What would you do in our shoes? Are we insane for thinking of buying at this "young" of an age?


• For all those that own a house, how much does maintenance cost on a monthly or yearly basis?

We want to make a financially sound decision but we have no idea what we're doing. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

Submitted January 20, 2015 at 10:05PM by napz http://ift.tt/1AHKEPU personalfinance