Looking for a place to call home...
A.k.a. my husband and I are finally seriously looking for our own place to stay. We have been very lucky in that we moved to London almost immediately after our wedding ceremony and stayed there for 10 months, and that his parents were quite open and willing for us to stay with them (in his old room) until we find our own place after we came back in early July. He is away at reservist (army! commanding men! loads of sweating and marching in the jungle! poor thing...) for 3 weeks starting one week after we came back, so we didn't immediately start short-listing properties, but we know that we would have to start sometime soon and preferably before our work gets busy (and before I actually get pregnant etc).
A short note for my non-Singaporean friends: housing in Singapore is generally expensive. You get to choose between public housing administered by the Housing Development Board (HDB) which are flats/apartments in high-rise buildings, generally cheaper, and for lower-income families they even give you a grant to help you purchase it, and private housing, which can range from condominiums or landed property like actual houses with land and gardens, which are quite expensive. We're talking London Zone 1 prices, and this is very very often for properties which are leasehold (99-year lease), not just the freehold ones.
So whilst we were in London, Litong thought that we might buy a private condominium for the facilities, namely the swimming and gym facilities. I did a lot of research into all the different requirements and procedures that one had to perform in relation to buying a private property (and have a very nice spreadsheet where I can calculate the most optimum loan amount based on our savings, salaries, CPF balances, the property's price, lease-left etc) (again for non-Singaporeans, CPF is basically a compulsory savings plan implemented by the Government which is intended to provide for our retirement in lieu of pension schemes, and people are allowed to use their CPF savings for purchase of property with certain rules, but the idea is that when you sell your property the money goes back into the CPF account so that you will still have money for your retirement).
We also had a very comprehensive discussion on what factors were important for us in a property (does it matter if it is on a low floor [yes for him] or whether it is near the train station [yes for me]) and then weighted the factors based on importance and have a little "scorecard" for when we start looking at the properties. We also narrowed down our choice of condominiums to around 6 in the west of Singapore, because we want to live near his parents, and they all had to be relatively near the East-West train line, because I wanted to live near the train station, and had to be built earliest in 2000, to avoid getting a property that had too short a lease left. We held off actually narrowing down to specific units that were up for sale because we were still in London.
Fast forward to us back in Singapore. We had one of those enlightening talks over the weekend where basically we agreed that paying such a high premium for a private condo merely for facilities like a gym might not make financial sense especially if we could just get the same effect by buying a treadmill and putting it in a HDB flat for a much lower price. So, suddenly, our options were increased tremendously with the possibility of getting a resale HDB flat instead.
So I find myself doing all the groundwork research again, because, guess what, all those procedures and requirements for buying a private property in Singapore? All just slightly different for buying a resale HDB. Yay.
A short note for my non-Singaporean friends: housing in Singapore is generally expensive. You get to choose between public housing administered by the Housing Development Board (HDB) which are flats/apartments in high-rise buildings, generally cheaper, and for lower-income families they even give you a grant to help you purchase it, and private housing, which can range from condominiums or landed property like actual houses with land and gardens, which are quite expensive. We're talking London Zone 1 prices, and this is very very often for properties which are leasehold (99-year lease), not just the freehold ones.
So whilst we were in London, Litong thought that we might buy a private condominium for the facilities, namely the swimming and gym facilities. I did a lot of research into all the different requirements and procedures that one had to perform in relation to buying a private property (and have a very nice spreadsheet where I can calculate the most optimum loan amount based on our savings, salaries, CPF balances, the property's price, lease-left etc) (again for non-Singaporeans, CPF is basically a compulsory savings plan implemented by the Government which is intended to provide for our retirement in lieu of pension schemes, and people are allowed to use their CPF savings for purchase of property with certain rules, but the idea is that when you sell your property the money goes back into the CPF account so that you will still have money for your retirement).
We also had a very comprehensive discussion on what factors were important for us in a property (does it matter if it is on a low floor [yes for him] or whether it is near the train station [yes for me]) and then weighted the factors based on importance and have a little "scorecard" for when we start looking at the properties. We also narrowed down our choice of condominiums to around 6 in the west of Singapore, because we want to live near his parents, and they all had to be relatively near the East-West train line, because I wanted to live near the train station, and had to be built earliest in 2000, to avoid getting a property that had too short a lease left. We held off actually narrowing down to specific units that were up for sale because we were still in London.
Fast forward to us back in Singapore. We had one of those enlightening talks over the weekend where basically we agreed that paying such a high premium for a private condo merely for facilities like a gym might not make financial sense especially if we could just get the same effect by buying a treadmill and putting it in a HDB flat for a much lower price. So, suddenly, our options were increased tremendously with the possibility of getting a resale HDB flat instead.
So I find myself doing all the groundwork research again, because, guess what, all those procedures and requirements for buying a private property in Singapore? All just slightly different for buying a resale HDB. Yay.