When are you comfortable spending money on home improvements?

[Anonymous]

I struggle with this as well. Our answer to this has been to set up an account for home maintenance. That way, the money is already set aside.

[Anonymous]

I have some renovation regret about some expensive changes we've made that in hindsight were a waste of money, but wood floors are not one of them. I'm very happy with that change and would do it again although moving in/out was a pain so do it before you ever move into a house.

The other thing I don't regret is having popcorn ceiling removed.

[Anonymous]

DH and I both grew up with single mothers and we’ve renovated our entire house over 15 years. I grew up in a shitty house. Every penny has been worth it. We love our house and use it to entertain because that’s something we love to do. We’ve used cash/HELOC and have lived through 3 major renovations (1 each floor) and then the exterior.

My sister makes way less than DCUM crowd and she replaced/added hardwood floors. Thats one thing we didn’t do because we live in an old house.

This thread may not sway you because it’s so personal. Maybe you need to think about your intention and overall spending priorities. As a pp said, home is so important to us. But, we also lived in it for a while before renovating because we weren’t sure how to live in it and wanted money to do renovations that had quality finishes. Also glad we waited because we would have done something more modern and then we decided to keep it traditional.

GL!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, we are struggling too. We are about to start 150-200k reno work and knowing we will never be able to recoup that money, I am questioning myself but i know it must be done.

How long have you been in your house?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I got conformable when I started using YNAB.

I've tried this but I could not get the hang of YNAB. I'll have to revisit it in the near future

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you pay from savings, how many months of an emergency fund will you have? I would save until I had enough for a comfortable emergency fund and enough to pay cash for the renovation. You can do one project at a time if it's hardwood floors, bathroom renovations, and hardscaping.

Even before the sale the inherited home, we had around 8 months of savings. We're well over that now and need to move the cash to better investments anyway (or use from home improvements). I always want to invest... my spouse wants to do some home improvements.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I totally understand you, OP.

While I didn't grow up poor, my parents made us think we were. I admittedly have lots of baggage around spending money.

I put our home improvement money in an account with a separate bank than our investments and regular checking/savings accounts. Seeing those separate accounts made it easier to sign the first contract.

I like this idea

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I got conformable when I started using YNAB.

I've tried this but I could not get the hang of YNAB. I'll have to revisit it in the near future

NP. You just have to watch the videos and follow along with the YNAB FB group until you get into the swing of things. I absolutely love it and echo that it’s life changing. It definitely has a learning curve so you are not alone on that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have some renovation regret about some expensive changes we've made that in hindsight were a waste of money, but wood floors are not one of them. I'm very happy with that change and would do it again although moving in/out was a pain so do it before you ever move into a house.

The other thing I don't regret is having popcorn ceiling removed.

Would you mind sharing which ones you regret? We had popcorn ceiling removed before we moved in and I can't imagine the basement if we hadn't done that

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DH and I both grew up with single mothers and we’ve renovated our entire house over 15 years. I grew up in a shitty house. Every penny has been worth it. We love our house and use it to entertain because that’s something we love to do. We’ve used cash/HELOC and have lived through 3 major renovations (1 each floor) and then the exterior.

My sister makes way less than DCUM crowd and she replaced/added hardwood floors. Thats one thing we didn’t do because we live in an old house.

This thread may not sway you because it’s so personal. Maybe you need to think about your intention and overall spending priorities. As a pp said, home is so important to us. But, we also lived in it for a while before renovating because we weren’t sure how to live in it and wanted money to do renovations that had quality finishes. Also glad we waited because we would have done something more modern and then we decided to keep it traditional.

GL!

How long were you in your home?

[Anonymous]

I have recently renovated 2 bathrooms. The old ones were functional, just 30 years old. My theory is that I wanted to enjoy the bathrooms vs renovating to sell.

[Anonymous]

Putting home improvement funds into a separate bank account really helped me - it was a visual reminder that we had a plan for that money I didn't notice the "drawdown of savings" when we spent it.