When Homebuying Meets the Holiday Season

Is your home search approaching the holidays? Maybe you weren’t shopping for a home before, but the holidays have you thinking more about it?  

We all know that there is quite a bit of hustle and bustle from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. But the homebuying process is a hustle and bustle already. That’s a lot of hustling and a lot of bustling to overlap them. So, what do you do? 

Preparation Over Perserverance 

The homebuying process is something to be enjoyed! Attending showings, getting pre-approvals, and making offers can be pretty seamless as long as you dedicate the time to it. That said, persevering through the holidays means your excitement could possibly lose some sparkle, making your final home purchase seem like a drag across the finish line instead of a jump and a high-five to a dream come true. 

If you can afford the time to slow your home search during the holidays, then we recommend using it for stress-free preparation. Here are four checklist items that will keep the homebuying hype going through the holidays without added hecticness.   

#1 Financial Focus 

What might be the hardest part about resuming a home search after the holidays is getting over how much money was spent during them. Between gifts, baked goods, and the occasional impulse buy of an adorable decoration, buyers tend to want to put the search off even more after the holidays are done. Well, instead of recuperating your holiday costs after they’re over, try this instead:  

Trade in holiday costs with non-essential every day costs one item at a time.  

Here’s how it works. Keep two lists on your phone. One is for holiday expenses, and the other is for expenses that you gave up. Let’s say you buy a $25 gift. Put it on your holiday list. The next time you decide against buying yourself a peppermint mocha, put the $7 on your other list. Decide on generic instead of a brand name at the grocery store? Put the $2 difference on the “gave up” list. Before long, you’ll start to feel like the holidays weren’t so expensive after all.     

This is a good time to review subscription services. Eliminating a streaming platform you barely watch anyway or pausing your luxurious wine of the month club will help make a dent in offsetting holiday expenses. 

#2 Chip Away 

Our next checklist item will also help you keep a positive financial mindset in motion. 

Choose one debt to chip away at during the holiday season. 

While making your regular monthly payments toward student loans, credit cards, etc., choose a single debt to make added payments toward. This tip is not only financially gratifying, but it’s also credit smart.  

Making additional payments toward a single debt can boost your credit score faster than if you spread them out over multiple debts. 

You can even try something similar to the method above for trading in expenses. Let’s say you receive a $100 gift card. You can take the $100 you otherwise would have spent and put it toward your chosen debt. 

#3 Develop the Wishlist 

Here’s a checklist item that’s a little bit more fun. The holidays are often a flurry of visits to other people’s homes. You can enjoy the good times while also being productive about your home search. 

Take note of things about other people’s houses that will help you expand your wishlist. 

Now that the home search is on your mind, you might notice things about friends’ and relatives’ houses that you hadn’t before. And they may ease the restrictions on your home search, making the process overall more fun. Consider these examples: 

• “I thought I was determined to buy a 2,000+ sqft home, but now I see I’d be happy in a smaller space with the right layout.”
•  “I thought specific architectural details were a must to make a home charming, but these other, added touches have achieved the same effect.”  

There’s nothing quite like the discovery of more possibilities to boost your enthusiasm. 

#4 Keep in Touch 

Remember that no question is too big or small when it comes to asking your real estate agent or mortgage banker. So, when a question pops up, you could wonder about it for days, spend hours researching it, or… 

Send a quick text to your agent or mortgage banker whenever a question pops up. 

You don’t have to actively be looking for a home to get professional advice, and oftentimes it’ll take your real estate professional the same amount of time to answer your question as it took for you to ask it, so don’t worry about bugging them. It’s more fun when you know that you can keep learning about homebuying even while your search is on pause. 

Enjoy Homebuying and the Holidays

All in all, this checklist will help you continue the homebuying process, even though the searching part of the process is on hold. It’s a great way to enjoy both homebuying and the holidays!