Expert: tammy siler - 3/4/2004

Question
My wife and I are contemplating buying an older home in the country for the purpose of fixing it up and eventually moving into it. It is a small acreage property tha needs a lot of work. We can buy this property outright if we take money out of our retirement account. We currently have a large home that we have lived in for about 23years and have a lot of equity in. Do you think we are doing the right thing or should we finace the new property. We are in no hurry to move yet and would like to fix up the old farm house a little at a time as we can afford it anticipating getting our retirement money back when we sell our present home. We know taxes are going to play a big part in how much money we will have to take out of our 401k. We're talking about 45-55 thousand dollars for the new property. Our current home is appraised for about 165 thousand which we owe about 52 thousand on. Can you give us any advice/ Thank you

Answer
My suggestion would be to take a mortgage for the new property.  You could get a construction loan, which would purchase the property and you could also finance all of the work you want done on it.Into one loan, and although the payments would be all interest they would be tax deductable!. Then once it is liveable you can do one of 4 things.
1.) Refinance it into a low interest rate 1st mortgage until you sell your current home if you think it might take awhile ( as construction loans usually only last 12-18 months)
2.) Once you sell your current home you can either take your profit from that and pay off your mortgage on your new home.
2.) You can take the profit and pay off what ever portion you want to pay off and save or invest the remainder
3.) you could just keep the mortgage on the new home and save and invest all of your profit from the sale of your current home.
Alot is going to depend upon what type of payments you want if any.
I would not for any reason use your 401k unless you were unable to obtain a mortgage, you would be paying interest on your own money and it soulds like you want to retire soon, I would hate to touch any of my retirements savings and I have quite a few years left to work.

I would suggest a mortgage to help you with taxes and also no penalties as there would be on the 401k, then once your new house in finished and you sell your current home, you get to make the choices you want not the ones you are forced into by decisions.

I hope this helps, and good luck.
Tammy