HOW TO FIND A SUPER CHEAP HOUSE!

what is going on YouTube I am prepper princess the author of living on almost nothing if you are interested in purchasing my book I will go ahead and leave a link down in the description box below and also if you could please hit the thumbs up or the thumbs down button whatever your thing is um it really helps me with the YouTube algorithm so that my videos get recommended to a lot more people um so today we're going to go over how to find a cheap house what to look for in a neighborhood how you know it's a good neighborhood a bad neighborhood how I choose my houses which I would never recommend to anybody else but I'll just tell you how I do it um things that people are afraid of and should not be afraid of and all this other stuff okay so first and foremost you should know that a house is a liability not an asset if you are taking out a loan on your house keep in mind that the average house is about 485 000 in the United States of America if you're putting down 20 and you're taking out a 30-year loan you might as well double the price of that it's going to be a 950 000 house because you're paying more in interest than you or well it depends on the interest rate but you're paying you're pretty much doubling the price of your house if you're taking out a loan if you're paying out in cash that's a different thing let me give you a little bit of background um first house that I had um was I don't like saying inheritance but it was an inheritance but there was still a mortgage so when my mother passed away I moved into her house took over the mortgage and I paid off the mortgage with my own money and um then after that we sold that house because it was partially my brothers and then I moved to Arizona where I paid sixty seven thousand dollars for a house it doubled in value in about two years now I live in the back in the state of California where the average price of a home is seven hundred eighty three thousand dollars at the time that I am making this video and my house was less than two hundred thousand dollars um so I'm pretty good at finding Thrifty things but the thing is is that I don't see this house as an investment I see it as a liability so if I'm seeing my home the place that I live in as a liability I want to pay as little as humanly possible I can take a piece of junk house and I'll make it comfortable enough for me to live in I've been slowly remodeling it's a fixer-upper you guys know the drill Okay so if you are looking for a cheap house um there's several different things that you can do and yes there are good houses and bad neighborhoods and there are bad houses and good neighborhoods and there's everything in between and I don't look at buying a house as a lifetime purchase that's just not the way that I look at it because I don't have I'm like a homeless person with a home like nothing is home to me it's just a house that I happen to live in until I decide to move on that's just the way that I look at it nobody not really anybody stays in their house for their whole lives it's very rare these days um so the first thing that you can look for when looking for a house that is cheaper is a house without a garage that's going to take fifty thousand dollars off of the price of the house right away because that's about the value of a garage to build your own garage I was looking around and Lowe's will build a single car garage on your property for like fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars and that includes assembling it so if you think about it this way you can save fifty thousand dollars on your house and then you can spend fifteen and then you just brought the value of your house up fifty thousand dollars by putting in your own garage um the there's not a whole lot of difference in price when it comes to one car garage or two car garage uh people just really really want a garage this house has a carport in the backyard I'm still trying to archaeologically decipher what this house was and is and whatever decisions people made it's so and I keep digging up driveways and Pathways and and I think that my carport used to be a house like not the anyway okay I don't want it that's two TMI okay number two that will save you you about twenty five thousand dollars is a house that has only one bathroom it is not impossible to live with one bathroom I grew up with one bathroom the house had two but we rented out the room that had the bathroom because my mom was we were poor so we always had a roommate um so our whole family had to uh uh share the front bathroom so living with one bathroom even a family of four it's doable it's not always fun you don't like you know walking in after somebody took a poop but you know you get used to it so any house with one bathroom instead of two is about twenty five thousand dollars less than a bat than a house that would have two bathrooms number three and this one's one that people kind of look over if you live one or two houses away from a power transformer on the on the power line so power if you're following the power lines and you see a big beige box or um some of them are cylindrical silver boxes that's a Transformer and for some reason uh that brings the value of a house down by like ten or twenty thousand dollars this one has a Tran the electricity comes in in the backyard but it's on a Transformer so I'm like kitty corner to a Transformer so that saved me twenty thousand I have no garage that saved me fifty thousand it's only got one bathroom that's 25 000. uh number four is if your house needs updating like it is usable as is but it's just ugly from the 1970s um they had weird Trends back then you can update it yourself which is what I'm doing but that's going to save you about 30 000 if it needs updating like for instance just look at my floor um the wood here is from the 1950s this is like the best most valuable type flooring and it is you can't find it anywhere else and if you have this type of flooring which I love you keep it I love this floor but I'm going to refinish the floor but it's going to be the absolute last thing that I do in this house because I've got to raise the ceiling I need a new roof painting the living room read a whole bunch of stuff always do the floors last but when you do them oh man especially if they're professionally done it's going to be gorgeous gorgeous number five oh in the bathroom oh my God I have a three-quarter size bathtub I don't even have a normal sized bathtub it sucks I'm that's an update that's going to happen anyway number five so it's sort of like the garage except if you don't have a driveway so if you have a house that is uh fenced in all around and there's no driveway so you only have street parking that's gonna hey oh excuse me that's gonna save you about twenty thousand dollars now the cool thing about a driveway is you can put one in yourself you can do it for cheap yourself you can hire somebody and do it anywhere from six to nine thousand dollars but it's gonna take twenty thousand off the value of your house so you're saving just think of all these this is like a hundred thousand dollars that you're saving and if you wanted to put all these things in it's about a quarter of the price and then when you do go to sell it's going to increase the value of your home number six is a fixer-upper now a fixer-upper can be cosmetic so and you're looking at about saving it about 30 to 50 000 depending on where you live um a fixer-upper is a place that hasn't been updated and it's also going to have some problems now here's some problems that houses have that I am not afraid of but keeps potential buyers way they're just like I don't want it I don't want it I'm scared of that um that is number one Foundation issues so you can take thirty thousand dollars off the price of a house for a foundation issue and people will stay away from that house the thing is is that most Foundation problems can be solved between six and ten thousand dollars so you have a foundation problem they take thirty thousand off the price of the house but you only have to pay 10 to fix it and that's that's kind of on the higher end Foundation issues are not nearly as bad as people make them out to be uh the second one in regard to that is the roof it needs a new roof so this house needs a new roof um who by the way who puts solar panels on like a 50 year old roof that makes no sense to me and I don't understand it it needs a new roof um not because there's anything wrong with it it's not leaking there's no missing shingles there's it's just really really old and my insurance company is telling me that they'll drop my insurance unless I get a new roof so I'm saving up for a new roof but I'm not afraid of buying a house that needs a new roof because again you can take thirty thousand dollars off the price but it's gonna cost you if you can do it yourself and six thousand bucks but four to six thousand you know depending on the size of your house but you can pay somebody 10 to 12 or 15 000 to put in a new roof where you're taking 30 000 so that's a half price savings um another one is bugs and termites now I've never I've never um gotten a house that has any bug or termite problems but I would not be I would not stay away from a house just because of that issue so you can take thirty thousand dollars off of a house that has termites because people automatically assume that it's completely rotted and your house is going to fall down like within the next year or two tent your house get your house tent tented and fumigated um fifteen hundred to two thousand bucks to do that and it's not really big issue when I sold my house in Livermore California um we had termites and we didn't even know it one of the things about selling the house and I'll get into this stuff later but one of the things about selling a house is when you do sell a house in the Bay area of California they want it to already be tented so we had to tent it before we even put it up for sale um number seven a manufactured home so for some reason by the way manufactured homes are now made as well as regular houses you know it's not 1950 we're a manufactured home you had to live in a trailer park and they're in bad condition and stuff my grandma lived in a manufactured home one of the nicer homes she had and it was on a foundation and they're they're really we call them snap together houses but they're actually they're really nice they've got great insulation um really good um like the like you don't have to uh insulated insulated really well don't be afraid of a manufactured house but other people are because they don't appreciate in value as much as a stick built home so if you are going to live in a house and you do not plan on ever selling it then you know consider a manufactured home because they're made really well it's going to last the rest of your life and they're like half the price of a stick built home but they're just as high quality so don't be afraid of manufactured homes number eight if you're older you're going to find cheaper houses in 55 plus gated communities or places that have HOA fees now you're like no HOA fees yes and no so there are some places that really suck like you go in there and they're like oh yeah a lot rents 150 a month but then there's all these stipulations on top of it like you have to have their cable their water their I don't know Fund in order to fund whatever it is that this is so your HOA fee turns out to be like seven or eight hundred dollars a month that's horrible but there's also places that have like a community center like they're they're in a community and they have like a swimming pool and like a lodge and um they only cost like 50 to 75 a month you can have whatever uh a cable you want and and by the way some places that have HOA you have to have cable and it's the cable that they make you have you can't have anything else um but there's some places that are different it depends it really does depend on where you live and if you're paying 50 to 75 a month for boat launching ability like you have your own private lake with boat launching um and you've got a lodge and a gated community and a swimming pool a splash pad all this cool stuff 75 dollars a month is not a lot to ask for you know so it really does depend but if you're you know 75 a month is not bad they don't force you to have cable you can do in some of these places are just on specific land where yes you can hang your laundry out to dry yes you can have a busted beat up old car in your driveway nobody cares the HOA fee is exclusively for the lodge and the swimming pool and you are required to pay it but that keeps so many people away so many people so just make sure if you want to go to a place that has HOA and you can afford it make sure there's not like this small print that says like you have to have this and do this and that and the other thing it's very specific so be careful with that but that will like your house will be half the price like half the price um number nine is foreclosure foreclosure and bank owned homes or even real estate owned homes um the bad part about buying these types of houses is that you have to pay in cash you can't get a loan form no bank is going to give you a loan no matter what they say um so be careful of that but if you buy a foreclosure or bank owned home you can get it anywhere from I mean you can go as low as 10 to 25 percent of the value of the home so you have Instant Equity you could just go in paint it put it back up for sale and within six months you've you've quadrupled your money that that can happen and I've seen it happen and I've missed a lot of opportunities because I'm stupid sometimes so uh definitely check check into that if you have the cash number 11 is buying an old house so I don't know why I I don't understand why it's always about location location for me but a lot of people don't want to buy houses that are 70 years old or older or 75 years old or older um I I don't I don't know why I I have no idea why maybe they don't like the design of the house or they think it's going to be a lot of work to upkeep it or something I I honestly don't know why but they're super super cheap and my house is like 120 115 years old super old it's a craftsman style you can see it in the background and I have a neighbor two doors down who redid her entire Craftsman she took these out I want to take mine out hers looks really nice and really big and open um and number 10 is living in a small town so there's a new song out try that in a small town I can't sing um so even though I'm in California and people call it Kami fornia um so I live in a small town and it's red as red can be here like it is red like people make sure that you believe in the Second Amendment it's like a requirement before moving in here um but the thing about living in a small town is number one the job there are job opportunities no matter what but the job opportunities are like not gonna be what you would get in Sacramento or San Francisco so over there you're making 150k a year here you're making 60 to 80k a year but the difference is 783 000 for a house or two hundred thousand dollars for a house so it's kind of the same thing and one of the other negatives also is that you're not really close to hospitals as we age and we get older we do need to be close to doctors and hospitals that is a big thing so those are the money-saving things so let's go to a couple of things about choosing a neighborhood when I go to a neighborhood there is nothing better than seeing an old lady walking or poodle or a girl in her 20s jogging with her headphones in because that tells me a lot that tells me that it is a neighborhood where an old woman feels safe walking alone with her dog that is not a pit bull um that is wearing a heavy chain to make it look meaner than it is so when I see that I see a safe community when I see a girl jogging wearing headphones she's obviously not caring about hearing her surroundings like gunshots are being robbed or pulled off the trail and beaten up or whatever um so she feels safe enough to where she doesn't even have to hear anything and she's jogging down the trail to get her exercise or jogging down the sidewalk another thing that I like to see in a neighborhood is sidewalks there's a lot of places in the United States that don't have sidewalks and honestly you are living if you have a sidewalk in front of your house you are in a blessed area more than likely like you are in a really good area if you have a sidewalk there is nothing wrong with not having a sidewalk that is another thing that is going to bring down the value of a house so look for that if you're looking for something cheaper something without sidewalks another thing that I like to do is I like to listen to a neighborhood so if I walk out of my car the first thing I'm going to do is stop and I'm going to look around I'm going to look for potholes in the street if the street is not well taken care of it's more than likely that the inhabitants of that street are not going to be taking care of their property as much as they would if they lived in a beautifully paved nice area so if there's potholes all over the street that's an indicator for a lower cost neighborhood and you can want a higher cost or you can want a lower cost you can move into the pothole infested place and then go to your city Camp Council and say we need funds to fix this street and maybe eventually they'll they'll fix it I also look for is so if if the front yard is gated that's just a preference of what you want the house to look like but if you have a bully breed dog or more than one chained up in your front yard I'm talking like a chain like I'm not talking about like a dog leash or um I'm talking like you have a pit bull that's got like spikes on its collars and it has a heavy chain and it is attached to something in your front yard I don't want to live near you because you are a jerk to your dogs for starters um second of all they are not trained because they're barking at me and they're also violent and I have dogs and I don't want my dogs to be around other dogs that are violent in case that dog breaks out or if my dog breaks out that would be terrifying for me um I also look at do any of the houses on my block have um broken down Vehicles collecting dust and cobwebs and spider webs in their driveways um I also look for junk in the front yard do you have old broken down lawn mowers and children's bicycles that are pushed over and not using the kickstand is does it look unorganized do you literally save cans and bottles in your front yard that you have strewn about all over the place that you're going to go and recycle someday when you feel like it um I also look for houses that have a lot of cars so if my house is a thousand square feet and your house is a thousand square feet I have one car in my driveway but you have 10. so that tells me that I am living in a neighborhood where the people living next to me are not educated enough to make a decent living so they have 10 people living in one house so they're they do not value themselves well enough to make enough of a living to afford their own dwelling but they can afford 10 cars which if they sold their 10 cars they could afford a dwelling anyway um I also look the the only two things that are a no the only thing that will cause me not to buy a house are two things one graffiti if there's graffiti anywhere in my in the neighborhood that I'm looking at I won't buy it not gonna happen I will not be near anywhere that has graffiti number two is um a food desert so if the only options I have are Jack in the Box Arby's Wendy's uh Taco Bell McDonald's Burger King that sort of thing but there's no grocery store that has fresh fruit and vegetables I won't live in that area those are two indicators to me that the crime is really high so that if they were to open a grocery store there would be so much theft that they're not willing to open a grocery store in that area and it's also an economic indicator meaning that um there's not enough jobs or enough people willing to work in that neighborhood in order to open a grocery store now I there is you can look up statistics online about like the poverty level in your area I don't care about that um and and I think that it's somewhat I just I I mean there's it doesn't really matter I don't care if you are poor or live under the poverty level but if that if you can't keep your home in order and you bring down the value of everybody else's house that's a problem um if you blast your music at all hours of the night and you're in and out of the house all hours of the night that's a problem but if you're poor you know and you're working a minimum wage job I've got no problem with that no problem with that but you have to have self-respect and dignity if I am going to live near you you can you can call me whatever you want for those for that call me whatever you want judge however you like but that's I'm not going to live in a neighborhood like that so when it comes to selling in order to get the most money for your buck the most the most dollars for your sale so there's a few things you can do first of all curb appeal is like the biggest thing um it's curb appeal is more important is is just as important as the interior of your house and that's the exterior so you want to keep your your plants nice and trimmed if you have rose bushes trim those leave some nice fresh roses on your front porch so that the potential buyer can see those um if you have like dead grass right now right now I have dead grass I don't have a sprinkler system but I've got two trees two big giant trees in my front yard it's the small front yard in a huge backyard so what I would recommend is getting one of those circular things that you can put around the trunk of a tree and just adding black bark that black bark is like 350 per bag and you only need two bags because there's like two trees so like for seven dollars you know you could potentially make your your front yard look so much better so much better um and you want to make sure that you know even if you only grow weeds mow your weeds and the best time to sell is of course when the grass is green but right now it's it's not anyway um trim your trees as best you can so that when the potential buyer walks up to your house they're not hitting their head on the branches of your tree um paint your front door black even if it you think it doesn't go with the house and put a kick plate on it you can get kick plates that are 20 bucks and a black paint you can get just you all you need is a cord for a front door so a quart of black paint and a kick plate is going to increase the value right away it's going to make them feel like they have a brand new door which is awesome when you move on inside the things that I would recommend first and foremost is window and door trim and baseboards um painted white they're not expensive you can install them yourself pretty easy to do I've gotten pretty good at trim um but that just leaves it it provides Dimension to the room and it increases the value of the house and then when it comes to painting don't paint white I hate white don't paint gray either I would recommend a really light off-white paint all of your trim and all of your baseboards white and then paint all of your walls every wall everything from the kitchen the bathroom the dining room the living room to a light off-white neutral color get rid of all of the Clutter that means any rugs any pillows any photos any sort of clutter in your house get rid of it when it comes to bedrooms the only thing that you should have in your bedroom is a really nice really well made bed and side tables with a lamp on each side that's it you should take out the dresser put it in your shed put it in the backyard put it in the garage and don't care where you put it get rid of everything else in the bedroom except for that it's going to make it seem so much bigger than it really is and if you have anything done to your house I would recommend having a I would recommend tenting your house keeping the receipt I would recommend having an inspection done keeping the receipt and any issues that are on the inspection try and repair those as best you can before you put your house up for sale um and especially if you have done any of the things that I was talking about like you fix the foundation you put on a new roof keep the receipts for those keep every single receipt so that when the buyer comes and says you need a new roof you can say no it's only two years old here's the receipt so that they're not trying to haggle the price down while you're trying to get the price as high as possible um let me think here include all appliances with the sale of your house and make sure that the appliances are stainless steel because even though they cost the same as black or white for some reason they make it seem more prestigious so I would recommend um buying stainless steel appliances and including them with the sale of your house same with the washer and dryer washer and dryer don't have to be stainless steel but include them with the price of the house and make sure that all your gutters are cleaned and you've picked up all the dog poop and you've just done as much curb appeal as you possibly can and I did tell you the way that I would shoot that I choose my house which I would never ever ever recommend to anyone else and I know I'm going to get a lot of heat for this I'm gonna they're gonna be like people are gonna be like what is man prepper princess is really stupid this is literally how I choose a house when I moved from Livermore to Bullhead City I had a friend who lived there I call I looked online I found the absolute cheapest stick built house that was on the market it was listed for 74. I called the realtor I said I'll do 67 cash no inspections no questions asked cash offer I sold it in a day they sold it to me they sold it to me in a day now that was a really great investment because it's doubled in price and it rents out for 1500 a month this one this one I called a realtor I said um I want a house for 200 000 he said that's not going to happen and I said make it happen two hundred thousand no inspections no inspections cash price offer no questions asked and he says I'll see what I can do the next day he goes I found one or he he said I found two and he did he found two the first one I said no and the reason I said no and it's too bad because it probably if if I wouldn't have had to deal with it anyway it was in Chico which is a really high class place but I don't like Chico because even though it's high class it's very liberal and blue and it's so condensed it feels crowded it's it's just a crowded City and he found me this one and he was giving me this tour where the the person who was selling it was the owner but there was a renter in the house and the renter was being very irritable and almost to the brink of violence with the realtor and the real and he was uh growing weed um on on the property which I don't care about growing weed but um the guy didn't want to leave so I knew that if I bought that house I was going to have a squatter and I was going to have to go through six months to two years of trying to get him off the property without being able to live there and that's too bad because it was like a three bed two bath decent sized backyard but it was also in a bad neighborhood right next to a homeless encampment and there were broken windows on the house so um and he was a drug user so um I didn't want to deal with that this one I never went to Market it was actually like a short sale the previous owner um his son the owner was like in his 90s he's still alive but his son um he was making a lot of bad financial choices like the solar on a 50 year old roof and um it when he sold it to me he actually had a loss so he had lived here for 16 years with his wife his wife opal um and um when he left he actually he still he owed more than he made so I gave the 200 000 which was it was less than 200 but with all the realtor fees and stuff it came up to 200 000 but um because he's still owed on the solar and he still owed on the mortgage he took the money and he paid and he still owed thousands of dollars on the mortgage even after selling to me but he was me his son forced him to move out because he was making a lot of really bad financial choices and he was getting older in age and he couldn't keep up the property he just couldn't do it so that's why everything in this house is totally outdated as you can see from my heating system there's no HVAC or air conditioning um the ceiling is drooping and needs to be taken up I remodeled the kitchen and the dining room and the bedrooms uh the next is going to be the roof the living room I mean then the bathroom and then I'll start moving on outward into the front in backyard but I enjoyed it I love doing this stuff I don't know what's wrong with me I know there's something wrong with me for enjoying doing this but I love taking something ugly and making it beautiful I don't know why all right folks it's getting late and I have been talking for way too long and I've been talking really fast to try and make the video shorter but I hope this video has been useful to you and again please hit the Thumbs Up Button because I really really could use your help in showing this on the YouTube algorithm so that I can get more views and continue to grow and teach you guys how to save money alright folks do which can with what you've got prepper princess out

Channel: Prepper Princess

Views: 108,542

Keywords: Cheap houses, house hunting, saving money on a house, finance, budget

Id: 30dg0n56ZOM

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024