Selling A House With A Shop - Leave It For Showing Or Empty It?

[clare]

There are same areas where the cost of d insurance in flood plane areas is so high it is "basically unavailable". a few years insurance will replace the structure.

[Markem]

Myth Busters! Best line in Stargate the TV series, in describibg how she manged to get the gate working "We kind of had to McGyver it".

[clare]

It's far from silly when it is at 0% or 0.25%

[clare]

Up here buying mortgage insurance is WAY more expensive than buying declining benefit term insurance from a life insurance company. 20 year mortgage? Buy 20 year term insurance. Iven straight term is less expensive than martgage insurance

[clare]

In many cases you can't even get a building permit in a flood plain up here.

[FrozenNorth]

Yep, mortgage insurance was offered of course, I declined, it was crazy expensive, irrelevant now though.

[J. Clarke]

If you haven't seen it, here's a blooper you might enjoy:

[krw]

...but you would have gotten exactly the same deal if you had &megabank write the check. It's all cash to the contractor.

[krw]

Or you can take cash and finance at a CU for 1 - 1.5%. Your point about 0% financing is a good one, though. I use it quite often.

[krw]

Yes, that's certainly the law however mortgage companies aren't known to be the most honest institutions. IME, they'll try anything.

[krw]

And it's not required, by law. That's not to say that life insurance is bad, just that the mortgage company cannot compel you to buy it.

[krw]

Hull insurance? ;-)

[krw]

It certainly depends on the frequency of flooding but that's the way it should be. Federal flood insurance is a boondoggle. Why are the richest being subsidized?

[krw]

"And a good majority of those people can easily afford the home they buy."

If the majority could easily afford the homes they bought, we wouldn't have had the mess in '08. Home affordability is even lower today.

We were discussing the difference between mortgages and cash (or at least paid off). If there was a mortgage they could get their panties in a twist but since not...

[Ed Pawlowski]

Why would you want one? Unless you are building a house on stilts.

[OFWW]

Mine was from the ground up, but it would be impossible for it to have flooded here as the land around me would have to be under 4 ft plus to have even hit the bottom of the stucco. That would have hit the national news had it happened.

One guy said it "trickled up", but even with all the earthquakes we've been through there is nary a crack.

I was glad that our garage door has a nice seal to it at the bottom, without that the rains would have wet the whole garage the way the winds were blowing.

[clare]

You would be surprised what is considered floodplain - and you would never be allowed to build in the majority of Florida - and definitely not New Orleans.under our rules.

Myself, if a house needs a sump pump, I'm really not too interested. I grew up in a house where when it rained, water from the street would often flow in the front door, down the basement steps, and out the cellar drain. That got old REAL fast. Dad ended up building a brick wall around the front porch and we had a "flood gate" that closed off the entrance if we were expecting heavy rain. The "wake" from the passing trucks was then stopped by the gate. He also raised the front porch about 8 inches higher than the living room floor and poured a "retaining wall" around the front of the foundation to guide the water around to the driveway. We had a 12 or 14 inch tile from a catch basin in the driveway between our place and the neighbor's, and in a heavy rain storm it would run full.. We were at a low point in the street, and our street was basically at the bottom of a hill where we got water running down several streets onto ours - with the "river flats" behind us. The creek flooded every spring but the flood level was never closer than about8 feet below the back/bottom end of out lot, and the lot sloped enough that the basement floor level was about even with the level of the back of the lot. We didn't have or need a sump pump because the cellar drain was open to daylight down in the "flats", but occaisionally we'd have a rat come up the drain into the basement.. In 1967 the town built a park in the old river flats

I had enough of flooding living there, so I look very close at drainage issues when I look at a house or property today!!!!

[krw]

Because, with national flood insurance, "we can have this awesome view and someone else will make us whole if it floods again". It's gotten harder to pull this sort of thing off but that's what these laws were addressing.

[Leon]

Well the mortgage company can compel you to buy it by turning you down for the loan or not.

[Leon]

The bank is not going to take your word for it and hand you a check for X dollars to build a new home. They send the check to the closing/title company. The builder has to pay title companies, surveyors, appraisers, and attorneys to get all the paper work together to prove that the house is worth the risk and to insure that the home meets certain standards to qualify for the loan.

Now if you borrow against other collateral or get a home equity loan and use t6hat to build a house then it would not matter to the builder.