The BAH rates in 2018 are a bit higher now. So what does this mean for you if you are stationed in Savannah? Watch the video below, or read the transcript and find out.
Here is the transcript for the above video.
The BAH rates in 2018 have recently gone up. What does that mean for you if you’ve decided that you wanted to buy a house rather than live on post or even rent a house off post? Psst! It’s no money down.
So here’s a chart showing what the current housing allowance is for the Savannah area and that means Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield. You can see… for this example let’s just say that you’re an E5 and you are married with dependents, so you’re eligible for $1617 a month. Now let’s jump over to a sample mortgage calculator.
This is one I found from Veterans United. We’ll just ballpark that the price of the house is $200,000. You’re putting zero down because you’re gonna buy it with your VA loan and then if the interest rate was 4.5%, and I’m just kind of ballparking that as well, we are estimating that your housing payment would be somewhere between $1233 and $1359 a month.
There is a VA funding fee that is charged at the closing table as part of your closing costs. But if you are considered at least 10 percent disabled they waive that. So we’re just showing you what a sample mortgage payment would be based on a $200,000 purchase price, and obviously we can go in and we can change the purchase price and see how those numbers change. But if you are entitled to $1600 a month for your housing allowance and your mortgage payment is $1500 a month you are basically getting a house for free.
You are able to buy it with zero down and then someone else is making your mortgage payment every month. When you sell your house if the house appreciated in value and let’s just say that you made a $15,000 profit that money is yours to keep. You don’t have to give that back to the military. This is how people generate wealth – investing in real estate, making a profit, and sticking it in the bank.
If you move to another duty station in three years and you don’t want to sell your house – maybe it hasn’t appreciated enough yet – you keep it as a rental property and now you’ve got money coming in every month. This is just a chart showing how much money you lose in renting. This were if you did not have any sort of BAH and you spent $1200 a month in rent, over the course of five years that’s $72,000! So if you’ve at all thought about buying a house this is the way to do it.
So now you know what the BAH rates are in 2018 and you have an idea of what you could afford to buy if you chose to buy a home rather than rent. But do you know anything about your VA entitlement? Unfortunately the military does a terrible job educating our service members on what they are entitled to when they decide to buy a home. No problem. Click the link below, head on over to my website, and download my free VA buyer’s guide and I’ll tell you all about it.
