In the first 2 weeks of the month, we were busy with moving to our rental 3-bedroom apartment. There was so much stuff that we had in our previous 2-bedroom apartment that we stayed in for 7 years. The packing and unpacking of boxes took a long time because we also had to buy new furniture to store some of the items. By the time we could go shopping for these furniture, it was just before CNY so their delivery took longer than expected. Since we didn’t do much visiting this CNY, we had more time to deal with other issues that came up when moving into the new place. Such as defects with the kitchen and toilets that needed to be fixed.
By the 3rd week, we were more settled into our rental 3-bedroom apartment and we received news that the sale of our previous 2-bedroom apartment was progressing. So we resumed our property viewings as we are still searching for a property to buy that we can renovate to our tastes and preferences. A place that can be our family home for a long time. After all, we don’t plan to rent past 2 years and it was only meant to hold our family for the time being until we find a more permanent home. Since we are still working from home quite a bit, we can actually go for property viewings on weekdays. Which allows us to squeeze in more property viewings every week.
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It’s not easy finding a place that meets our requirements. There’s always some kind of trade-off between price, location, condition and timing. The more we are willing to pay for the property, the trade-off is lower but the impact to our finances is bigger. In terms of cash drain and liquidation of investments. We don’t want to set ourselves back financially by purchasing a property that stretches our finances to the limit. Even if both of us can continue to work and draw salary income from our jobs, it would be stressful to handle a large monthly mortgage payment along with the maintenance costs. And we can’t save or invest as much.
But we have to acknowledge the allure of buying a nice property for our family to stay in. And we find ourselves expanding the budget as we view more properties. It’s a difficult balance to manage between being objective about what we can reasonably afford and being subjective about what we want that is less affordable. While we are building up our property knowledge with more viewings, we also keep changing our minds as new information flows in. Anyway, we still have less than 2 years to make up our minds and just have to be patient with our property search.