scribbled thoughts. (original) (raw)
Not been posting much about the home recently mostly because it's actually been less action. We've gone around looking at furniture and lights and appliances and sanitary fittings (and being appalled by some of the prices we are seeing) and have been updating our budget sheet. We've also sent off various requests for quotations and some have come in, including two recommended IDs/contractors. Unfortunately, after giving us a very detailed quotation, they both flew off for holiday and will only be back next week onwards? So we're taking a breather (after the shock of seeing how much handiwork costs for laying tiles is).
Anyway, we've basically started planning 3 months earlier than most people have, since we will only get our keys likely March 2016, and we have another month and a half to go before our FIRST HDB appointment. We can't even buy furniture or appliances because they won't hold it for us for more than 3 months sometimes, and Litong is convinced that if they have a sale now, they will have a sale during Christmas, and then during Chinese New Year, so locking in the price is less of an issue.
Instead, let me jazz up my boring words-only post by showing you moodboard pictures. All from Pinterest!
From here
We were quite inspired by this picture, loving the colour wall at the back, white walls generally, coloured furniture. We are aiming for a teal sofa from castlery!
From here
Husband loves this colour scheme: concrete coloured floors, walnut/dark medium wood furniture, white walls.
From here
My intended kitchen colour scheme: dark coloured cabinets/drawers, wood counter top, white subway tile walls and wood-like tile flooring.
From here
Finally, the colour scheme for the bathroom: dark slate floor tiles, white subway tile walls, black painted pipes.
Yesterday night I attended my husband's boss' wedding, which was made more fun because my husband works in the ministry that is in charge of the statutory board which I used to work in (where we met) so we had some mutual friends who attended. (Also, my ex-Minister and my current Minister both attended! He also invited ESM!??)
My husband and I met at work, where he was seconded to my department from the ministry, and in the same department we started going out, and eventually I left the statutory board to another place and then he proposed. But effectively we were working in the same department on the same project(s) as a dating couple. Most people who worked with us knew about this, but because we maintained a professional front whilst working, it wasn't super obvious.
So yesterday night we met the lawyer at the ministry he currently works in, who had worked with us on the big project before. She obviously knows who my husband is since he is now working with her, but I wondered whether she still remembered me (the project was around 3 years ago now). So we said hi, my husband asked whether she remembered me, to which she was like, ah yes, from IDA right? Though I've forgotten your name... and I was like haha yes you still remember, yes I'm Lili.
After which I was like, oh yeah and you know that I'm now his wife right?
And she totally did a whut-face and a complete double-take. And then a pleasantly-surprised-lol face. It was amusing to watch. She then had to clarify that we were indeed dating during the project and she was even more enlightened/amused. (And had a mock-scandalised look before she revealed she also met her husband at work. Us civil servants. :P)
It was a fun experience. :P We've been married for more than a year now and we almost never get these encounters anymore.
But yeah, we're still enjoying our married life. It's fun! :D
So I've been playing around with Google Sketchup, initially just to try and reproduce (and then modify easily) our floorplan, but yesterday I managed to actually try my hand at the 3D part of things and came up with the following image to illustrate what I meant when I tell people to quote me for a pergola/trellis at our balcony:
I showed my husband very proudly and he was like... O_O Maybe we don't need an Interior Designer (ID) anymore. Lol.
Stuff I've been lusting for the new place:
This sofa from Jottergoods. It's really stylish and comfy. We managed to sit down on it when we were walking around IMM months ago.
Jottergoods again, I'm becoming a big fan. The desk was something I lusted for since last year, when we were looking for a temporary desk for my husband's room. And the pencil box behind (the open-up cabinet)! I'm definitely eyeing that for my cloth and sewing and crafting supplies, next to a sewing machine on a table. Not sure where that's going to go yet, but that's the idea.
Paulownia Wood Chest/Kiri-tansu for kimono
This one is definitely in the lust-worthy zone, unfortunately not sure whether its in the possible-to-buy zone: a traditional Japanese paulownia wood chest of drawers (tansu) for my kimono collection. Kiri/paulownia wood is traditionally used for storing kimono because they have insect repelling and humidity-withstanding qualities, and traditional tansu drawers are made to fit perfectly and exactly into the drawer space. Apparently they actually make the drawers bigger than the space, and then slowly shave it smaller until it fitted, perfectly. This one is probably in the range of S$2000 to S$3000 range including shipping, if I can even get them to ship it over to Singapore. But. *_*
Also, because of Bern, I found Roger&Sons, a local Singaporean custom carpentry studio. I don't have a snazzy photo for this one, but I was really attracted by their work attitude, so I'm currently in the midst of checking with them on something secret for our balcony! :D
And since I officially passed the property agent the cheque for the balance of the $5000 deposit and signed page 8 of the option to purchase, I think we can proudly say we are well on my way to owning our own place!
That's us, right there. A double-storey flat (known as an Executive Maisonette or "EM" for short) with 3 bedrooms and a utility room (which has been torn down by the current owner but we intend to reinstate it + steal some space from the kitchen to make it actually liveable) and three bathrooms. Also, a double-storey super long balcony! I know it's huge but we intend to stay there for at least 10-15 years and I also intend to have 3 children so hopefully that means we will actually have to use each of the bedrooms as bedrooms.
In the meantime, bedroom 3 is probably going to be our study/guest bedroom (and I am toying with the idea of stuffing my sewing machine + crafting stuff there), the utility room will be a storeroom, and bedroom 2 will be empty and then maybe a nursery/kids room when time comes.
We're definitely going to go with the one suggestion we've heard the most from other young parents: minimize built-in furniture (because you pretty much have to rearrange your house once the kids comes/grows/grows up). So currently the only things we will be "building in" is likely to be the under-staircase storage, the fixtures for the bathrooms, and maybe the kitchen. "Maybe" because I've been staring at the new IKEA kitchens and it looks really good. (Is IKEA counted as built-in?)
Even with the lack of built-ins, there's still a fair amount of renovation to be done, because the place hasn't been renovated since the current owner moved in around 15 years ago, and some of the areas are actually original condition, from when it was built 30 years ago (the toilet tiles are in remarkable condition considering their age lol). The current owner also doesn't have a lot of built-in furniture which means we can save a little bit on tearing down of existing furniture, but we are probably replacing the flooring, the tiled walls, all the toilet fixtures, doing a full rewiring, redoing the waterproofing of the wet areas, and if possible, replacing as much of the existing water pipes as possible. Basically, do it up in a way that we can safely say it will serve us well for at least the next 10-15 years. The location is really good (close to my in-laws, close to two good primary schools and childcare, close to supermarkets and wet markets and eating places, close to the mrt train station, quiet-facing, near two parks) so we definitely can envision living there for as long as we need to.
Oh yes and because it's an EM, as short-form I've nicknamed our new place Emma. :P
More pictures in the next post!
Which if you think about it, makes sense. I will never spend so much money at one shot and land myself in debt for the next 15-25 years again.
But other things matter in life... right?
Though, we did actually settle on the one place that we liked a lot, and started our journey to actually owning it. So that's $1000 by cheque (I freak out a bit everytime I write a cheque, I keep worrying I would get it wrong somehow), some option form signed, some online forms on HDB filled up and submitted (one is literally a checklist. Like. Tick all the boxes. I guess it is informative for someone who is new to all this property buying, but I've been researching this property buying for months now) and now apparently HDB has sent someone down to value the flat and soon there will be a valuation report and I'll have to send it over to the banker (who I have still not met, everything through email!) and then we'd get the Letter of Offer and can exercise the option etc etc etc.
Boring stuff. We are both currently dreaming up ways we would like our new place to look like. Much more fun.
I am also trying to plan a Japan trip for Jan 2016. More fun!
Also, reading pregnancy books, not bad. Apparently most people get pregnant within one year of actively trying to get pregnant. :)
Stupid? questions we ask ourselves during the process of buying our own house/flat for the first time.
"Oh I think I have a chequebook. Somewhere?" *digs around for a bit* "Nope. Hmm."
"Can I actually write a cheque for $100k? Is there a limit to how much I can write a cheque for?"
"If we want to offer xkfortheplace,dowetelltheagentfirst?Whendowegivetheagent/buyerthexk for the place, do we tell the agent first? When do we give the agent/buyer the xkfortheplace,dowetelltheagentfirst?Whendowegivetheagent/buyerthe1000 cheque?"
"Says here we can pay by NETS or cashier's order. What's a cashier's order?"
"Would the Cash-over-valuation component overlap or be separate from the cash component of the initial down-payment??"
If you can't already tell, we're at that stage of house-hunting when we are actually considering offering for one and realising how out-of-depth we are with the operational bits of it.
And for a little bit of a non-house-buying post: we recently saw the gameplay for One Piece Warriors on PS4 and lusting for it so badly. We might just buy a PS4 just to play it. Are there any good dance games for the PS4?
Was the title a load of jargon for you? Then you probably haven't tried to buy a property in Singapore yet.
The husband and I decided last week that we've done enough computer-based research and let's start to actually *gasp!* look at some units that are being sold! So instead of just planning on paper, to actually execute the plan. Of course, that's when you realize that the planning (especially if it's something you've never had any experience in) is often lacking.
So according to online sources, before you ask to view someone's property with the intention to buy it, you need to have an In-Principle Approval (for a loan) (IPA for short) from a bank. I still don't have it, so I don't know what it looks like, but I assume it's some sort of document. [After-note: So we went to visit one of my husband's friends' HDB flat, because he happens to own a unit at the same block we were eyeing, and he said that you can TOTALLY go view property even without an IPA, it's like window shopping, and really only need it when you intend to actually offer to buy the property at the point of viewing. Hmmph.] [After-after-note: So apparently for us, an IPA is just a line in an email by the bank which says our IPA is approved for $XXX for a loan tenure of XX years. Oh. I was expecting at least a document to print out lol.]
We got quite confused as to what the IPA actually entailed. Firstly, we were looking at two scenarios: buying a HDB flat and buying a private condo, and the budget we had for each of the scenarios differed by almost half a million dollars. In addition, we have CPF and cash savings, so the actual amount we would borrow in either case would be less than the actual budget (and less than 80% of the property, which is the legal limit for borrowing). If you use those comparison websites for home loans like http://www.moneysmart.sg , they ask you for quite a lot of details including whether you intend to buy a HDB or private, how much is the property and what percentage is your loan, so we were confused as to whether we needed to have a good idea of the loan amount before we asked for an IPA, or not.
For us personally, we used the Moneysmart tool to figure out which bank's loan works the best for us, and then tried to visit that bank (we chose Standard Chartered) to ask about an IPA. For us, it was a matter of deciding whether we preferred a loan with the same interest rate throughout the life of the loan, or one which had a lower interest rate in the beginning and then increases it after maybe the 3rd or 4th year of repayment. The latter is great for people who want to refinance their loans after a few years, but since the husband and I think interest rates are actually going to rise, refinancing to get a better rate might not be possible. Anyway I'm a super-low-risk kind of investor, so we thought we'd go for a loan with the same interest rate. (All these are not fixed-rate loans, but floating rate loans, where the bank adds an additional interest rate over some floating rate, like SIBOR + 0.9% for the first 3 years, and SIBOR + 0.9% for the "same interest rate" type loans and SIBOR +1% for the increasing interest rate type loans)
So anyway, having decided on a bank, apparently you can't just show up at a bank branch and expect them to entertain you, at least not for Standard Chartered. Their bank branches don't usually have their mortgage specialists sitting around, so when we went down to the bank they took down our details and got their mortgage specialist to call back. Apparently for Standard Chartered, you don't even need to meet them in person to get an IPA, the bank person just called me up, understood what we wanted, and then emailed over an application form and a list of documents he needed to process the IPA. Most of the documents he needed (latest payslip, tax notice of assessment, credit card statements, CPF contribution history) are readily available in an electronic form anyway, so it was a matter of filling in the application form together, scanning that in, and sending over the whole bundle to him and hope for the best. (I know for certain that Citibank does this IPA thing through an online form! Which would be extremely convenient. But we already knew roughly which bank we wanted the final loan for so we didn't use the online form.)
This was the point where I kind of kicked myself for not having cleaned up my credit card usage beforehand. I've amassed 9 credit cards from 5 different banks in my working life and just before I left for London, cancelled 2 of them (UOB, because they don't allow you to check your credit card statements online?? -_-), and when I got back, cancelled another 2 of them (promotional credit cards which I never really used), but still had 5 credit cards from 4 different banks at the end of it. I wanted to centralize the usage to two or three cards for some time now, but was too lazy/busy to actually start moving the payments. And because there are now rules on how much you can loan in general (TDSR - Total Debt Servicing Ratio: where all your debts such as car loans, personal loans, mortgage loans AND credit card monthly repayments are not to be more than 80% of your monthly gross income), I had to patiently fill in the info for all of my five cards which was a pain. Compared to the husband who only has 2 cards. Hmmph.
The whole IPA approval was relatively painless, except that when the mortgage specialist received our credit bureau reports, the husband apparently had owed his credit card bank a sum of money for more than 2 months! Actually, it was only because it was UOB, who didn't allow for online credit card statements to be viewed, had charged him annual fees when we were in London (I had cancelled my cards because I was worried this might happen but husband just decided not to use his card at all), and we didn't (and couldn't) realize and it had rolled over one to two months before eventually UOB had waived it anyway. So we had to provide the mortgage specialist the credit card statements that showed all this happening, and he accepted it after that and issued us our IPA. From this we could tell that credit reports didn't really show much detail on exactly what was owed (or maybe even how much was owed?) but it was not an issue in the end.
And in the end, to answer some of the questions I had in the beginning, the IPA basically tells you the maximum loan amount the bank would be willing to offer you, and you don't have to take up the entire amount. But this means that you would be able to go look for a property within your budget. We clarified with our mortgage specialist that we intend to look at both HDB and private, and he gave us different loan amounts with different tenures for HDB and private condo (because the loan restrictions are less tight for private property, so the bank is willing to give us a loan for a larger amount and a longer tenure for buying private property). For us, because we did our own calculations even before approaching a bank, we already knew our own budgets and what kind of loan would entail what kind of monthly payment etc, so the IPA was more of an official confirmation than being informative in any way, but I assume for most people the IPA would be either a wake-up call or a pleasurable confirmation on what kind of property they can buy.
So now we are (proud?) recipients of a IPA, and the next step of actually calling up agents and asking to view flats... start.
In line with the my-office-lets-us-leave-work-early-for-exercise-on-Wednesdays, apparently quite a few people in my office also organized and attends zumba fitness classes on Wednesdays, so I joined them yesterday.
As a result I am aching all over today. BUT! It was great, a good workout which was quite fun. I'm going to try to control my movements more the next lesson which probably results in more elegant exercising (arms flail! fat jiggle!) and maybe less ridiculous aching (I had to roll out of the bed this morning instead of sit up).
So, adult ballet on Mondays and Zumba on Wednesdays. I need to compensate for the amount of yummy food I'm eating everyday!
This Saturday my friend 
sodiumion is helping to run a yukata workshop, where participants can learn more about the history of yukata and how to wear one. I helped out last year and it was quite fun, plus it was a nice occasion to wear a yukata! We were getting quite excited about the event until today when a bunch of cock-ups meant that we might be getting more than twice the amount of participants we had last year, with the same venue, same number of yukata, same number of volunteers as last year, and they only notified us about this... 3 days from the actual event? So, a lot of stress and worrying about how this is actually going to affect the event itself. I'll report back on this...
But then, actually, for someone like me, doing anything relatively complicated entails plenty of research. Please see my bookshelf for my collection of cookbooks, travel books, and recently, pregnancy books. (No, I'm not pregnant yet, but these things need researching early no?)
But I digress.
When it comes to buying property in Singapore, there was a chunk of information that needed to be researched and then digested and understood. I think I'm at the 55% to 70% mark in terms of finishing my reading and researching so far, so I thought I'll list down some of the websites I've been using. Because having to go back and retrace my steps to find out where I should read in order to buy a HDB flat (when previously I did my research on condos) was sort of stupid.
1. HDB website: http://www.hdb.gov.sg/fi10/fi10321p.nsf/w/BuyResaleFlatOverview?OpenDocument
I linked the buying a resale flat portion because my husband and I are not eligible to buy a new HDB flat (income ceilings...), but reading through this website literally page by page was extremely useful and probably recommended even if you hire an estate agent to help you. It includes details on whether or not you're eligible to buy a HDB (and which type), any grants from the government you might be eligible for, the kind of loans (and limits of the loan) you can take up, how much of the downpayment needs to be in cash as well as the actual procedure chronologically.
2. HDB Centralised Map: http://services2.hdb.gov.sg/web/fi10/emap.html
Super useful map of Singapore which gives you details on every single HDB block, including when was the lease starting date of the block, what kind of flats are in the block (how many 3-rm, how many 4-rm etc), previous transactions within the last 2 years (including which floor, what kind of unit, how big the unit was, and how much it was sold for) etc. I use it primarily to look for the specific blocks I would want a unit in (because I want a flat that doesn't have an internal rubbish chute, which means it has to be a block that has a lease starting after 1993), and to check that those blocks have units that I would want (something bigger than 100sqm, preferably 5-rm) and to see what size their 4-rm or 5-rm units are (from previous transactions) and also transaction pricing. Also, you can check whether the block is near schools or food centres.
3. Other government websites:
CPF - https://mycpf.cpf.gov.sg/Members/Schemes#Housing
To figure out how much of your CPF can be used for housing and other requirements.
IRAS - https://www.iras.gov.sg/IRASHome/Property/Property-buyers/
To try and calculate Buyer's Stamp Duty, Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty, Mortgage Duty, and thereafter Property Tax.
MAS - http://www.moneysense.gov.sg/life-events/buying-a-home.aspx
Actually this is the Moneysense website but it's technically by MAS. This one helps with the new Total Debt Servicing Ratio and Mortgage Servicing Ratio, basically the cap on how much of a mortgage you can take as a percentage of your monthly income. Non-Singaporeans, this is actually a legal requirement for us. :)
4. On loans: I'm not done with my research on this yet, but so far this blogpost has been amazing in demystifying home loans for me so far: http://www.livecollectiva.com/2014/02/housing-loan-singapore-sibor-vs-sor.html
There's also the rather comprehensive document by the Association of Banks Singapore on home loans which I intend to read in detail soon.
http://www.moneysense.gov.sg/~/media/Moneysense/Guides%20and%20Articles/Guides/HomeloanEng.pdf
5. There is no better website than this amazing one if you want to know more about HDBs. I came across it basically trying to answer the question of: how young does a HDB block need to be if I don't want it to have individual rubbish chutes? This website covers this and so much more! I actually quite enjoyed reading the history and evolution of HDBs - now I know why the newer blocks only have Model 4A for 4-room flats and Model 5 Improved for 5-room flats (and when did 5-room actually mean the same number of rooms as a 4-room flat... I know, slightly illogical).
http://www.teoalida.com/
6. If you need the floor plan for a condo unit and the property listing doesn't have it? Odds are, you can find it on http://condo.singaporeexpats.com/property/condo
There are still going to be one or two weird condominiums that you won't be able to find floorplans for, but so far that website has been a goldmine.