Time to breathe, time to plan

[missroserose]

After an obscenely busy few months, my massage bookings seem to be slowing down a bit. I'm no longer booked two to three weeks in advance, although I have a callout coming up on Friday with three bookings, which makes me happy—it's far more convenient to have three appointments in a row than three scattered throughout the week. And while callouts mean I have to lug my table around they also mean I don't have to clean my house, heh.

Now that I have a moment to breathe, I'm starting to give some thought to the future. We're planning to condo-hunt over the next month, and while our current set-up of my working in the living room has got me this far, it's not ideal—there's no door, and if Brian's home he has to hang out in the bedroom while I'm working. And obviously I can't work while we have houseguests, and I have to move the furniture every time (luckily not difficult on hardwood floors, but still). It's possible we'll find a condo with a space where I could set up my table semi-permanently, but in the price range we're looking at it seems unlikely; and if the level of bookings I've been seeing for the past few months turns out to be a new baseline rather than a blip, I'm going to need a dedicated workspace soon. And that's not even considering the logistics of trying to work while we're packing and moving.

I'm giving some thought to renting a room. There are lots of places in Chicago with massage rooms they'll rent to independent practitioners, though often there are availability limitations, or it's prohibitively expensive to rent more than one or two days per week unless you've got multiple bookings per day. (One of the downsides to catering to the atypical-schedule crowd is that your bookings tend to be pretty spread out.) Can't hurt to keep an eye out for signs and start talking to people, though...especially since searching for "massage rental" on Craigslist brings back some not-terribly-useful (though interesting!) results.

Comments

[jamesd]

On the buying side, it's likely that you'll never see such low interest rates again in your lifetime. That implies that you should seek the longest mortgage term possible and do the greatest sensible amount of borrowing.

Term: long terms minimise the capital part of the monthly payments. Combine this with low interest rates and it becomes very easy for putting the monthly extra money into investments when you're able to afford this. The combination is likely to make you far better off than unnecessarily paying off mortgage capital. Helps with payment affordability early on or in future tough times as well.

Amount: since it'll be hard to get such a good interest rate in the future that implies looking to exploit the rate by taking the biggest property value step that you can.

Probably unaffordable for you but the US concept of buying a double family home, living in one and renting out the other.

[missroserose]

The low interest rates are definitely a big motivator to buy now rather than wait another six months. We'll be talking to a banker about different options; I believe longer-than-30-year mortgages are difficult to obtain in US because the government won't buy them, but I might be wrong about that. Honestly, the biggest hurdle I see ahead is housing stock; thanks to the aforementioned interest rates they're at a record low right now, so we'll have to see if there's anything available that we like as much or more than the place we're renting.

Brian and I have discussed the option of buying a duplex (or a place with a mother-in-law unit) to rent out. He's been on the fence about it; we have at least one friend who'd be happy to rent from us, but he really likes having his own space where he doesn't have to worry about the guy downstairs. I'm also somewhat on the fence, in no small part because renting would basically amount to a second (third) job, and while I'm pretty sure I could handle it (hurrah for my history as an admin and high executive function) there comes the question of how much time I'd be spending on things like arranging repairs, addressing complaints, screening tenants, tracking additional tax paperwork, etc. etc. On top of my massage business and yoga teaching it starts to feel a little overwhelming, especially since a vacancy would potentially mean difficulty making our mortgage payment.