Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

I was recently reading a lovely new book edited by a friend, Ellyn Spragins, called "What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self." In the book, 41 famous women, from Madeleine Albright to Maya Angelou, write letters of advice to their younger selves, with insights they wished they'd had when they were younger. Angelou, for instance, tells her 17-year-old self: "Be courageous, but not foolhardy."

As the real estate buying season heats up, I felt inspired to write a letter to the homebuyer I was four years ago, when I purchased my first single-family home with no small amount of dread and foreboding.

Dear Laura:

I know you feel like a pest, badgering the real estate agent, making him show you 40 different houses and demanding the last 12 months of comparable sales on every other dwelling in town. Stop feeling pesty. That's his job. Knowing the asking and selling prices and key features of neighboring homes will turn out to be the best tool you have in confidently negotiating the home you buy.

Look at the bones of the place and the layout -- not the faded wallpaper, the worn carpeting, or the velvet portrait of Elvis in the living room. Use your imagination, because perfection is expensive. You won't go wrong buying a house with excellent bones that requires a little T.L.C.

Even if you can't afford your dream home, buy something you can potentially live in forever, rather than a starter home. Remember your friends, back in the late '80s, who bought one-bedroom co-op apartments in Manhattan and then found themselves trapped there with a couple of kids, unable to find a buyer after the market crashed?

Don't forget those friends just a few years ago who decided to sell and rent, because they were certain the market had topped out and would soon decline, leaving them in a great position to buy? They're still renting. If you choose something with adequate space, the vagaries of the real estate market won't trouble you.

Live in the home for at least a year before doing major renovations. I know you're itching to replace the kitchen's 1960s yellow linoleum floor, the antiquated cabinets, and the white Formica countertops with the faded gold sparkles. But if you live in the house for a year, you'll have a better idea of how you use the space.

If you renovate immediately, you won't realize how crazy it can be to have the kids doing their homework in the adjacent dining room while you cook dinner in the kitchen. You won't have experienced running back and forth every time they need help reducing a fraction or sounding out a vocabulary word. If you wait, you'll realize that the renovation budget should include bumping out the kitchen wall by four feet and getting the kids in the same space with you.

When you do that renovation, hire a good architect who can help you see the possibilities. Going straight to the contractor will save money, but you'll be sorry you missed out on the vision a good architect can offer.

Convince your spouse to use a professional to paint every room in the house at once and refinish all the floors at the same time. This will be somewhat expensive, but you won't regret it. You'll discover that the cliché about homeowners spending every weekend at Home Depot is actually true: A single-family home presents all sorts of weekend maintenance projects that an apartment does not. If you try to paint room by room yourselves, you will not finish until the year 2050. Do let your spouse paint the basement, however, since the kids and the gerbil who will eventually live there won't care about the quality of the finish.

Save every receipt from your renovation. There'll be dozens of them. You'll be glad you bought a three-ring binder and methodically filed this chaos, because when you sell, the IRS will allow you to include these renovation costs in calculating what you paid for your home, otherwise known as your "cost basis." Depending on how much the place appreciates, this could reduce your tax bill when you sell.

Pinch blood from a stone and take the 15-year mortgage. Yes, the monthly payment is significantly higher than the 30-year you're considering. I know you follow the "Starbucks barista rule": The mortgage payment should be small enough so you can make the monthly nut -- even if your career tanks and you have to make lattes all day at Starbucks. But the rates on a 15-year loan are below 5 percent, and you won't believe how fast the coming years will fly.

If you take the 15-year mortgage, you'll have the house paid off when your youngest kid is still in high school. Talk about financial freedom. Instead of relying on the barista theory, consider a more conventional rule of thumb: Your monthly mortgage payments should be no more than 30 percent of your gross income.

The second year you're in the home, track all of your expenses -- every penny -- for 12 months. Don't do it the first year, since you'll fritter away astronomical sums of money at Pottery Barn and Target, and this will depress you.

Do it the second year, so you can quickly get a handle on (and better prepare for) the esoteric maintenance costs peculiar to homeownership -- soil and flowers in the spring, the annual homeowners' insurance bill, even those fabulous Halloween decorations. If you ignore these expenses, they'll devour your budget, and you won't understand why you can't seem to save a dime.

Don't be so quick to tear out the former owner's quirky additions. That weird foam padding on the back of the attic door? The plastic sheets sealing the attic windows? Before you consider improving the aesthetics, live through all four seasons in the home, including the first eye-popping winter utility bills. Those eccentric little upgrades will become your friends.

Do a little more research on the schools before you buy. Just because many places offer full-day kindergartens doesn't mean that your town does. (Duh.)

The suburbs will be more fun than you expected. (And you can move back to Manhattan in 20 years.)

Welcome home!

Laura