Utilities, Taxes

There are a few unknowns that I am finding a wee bit scary for owning our first house. Things like not knowing what our utilities will cost, I did some research on a forum that is for our builder in our town and some families were kind enough to share their utility costs and it looks like I have over budgeted by at least $50/month which is great. I'd rather do that then get burnt. Also the first year we may be required to submit a security deposit with some utility companies. Also we won't have equal billing until we have a years worth of data so while our summer and fall will be nice the winter may hit us really hard.

The other Big Unknown is our property tax. This has such a huge margin we don't know what we will be paying. To make it more difficult it can take between 6 months to 3 years to have our house assessed- and at that time the full amount is due- either a full 6 months up to 3 years! Where I will put it depends on how we are able to work things out when we qualify for our mortgage, if we find some way to keep our credit line (not sure how yet) then we will put the tax payments there and save on interest until it is due and if we have a loan I will set it aside in our savings account at another bank.

We aren't really going to have a lot of money to start off, especially with the unknowns, we know that we do have to pay for a fence which is silly expensive approx. $5000, Mr K plans to do all the labour so we can save hopefully a couple thousand there by just buying materials ourselves. It's a law that you must put up a fence- granted you are only forced to put up that metal wire looking fence but why would we pay for that to replace it later! hideous.

We just don't know what we will be missing or need when we get there. Items for landscaping, blinds for windows etc.

So, we'll be as conservative as possible. For holidays we have only been buying eachother gift cards for Home Depot etc. For Christmas we will be asking for Home Depot and Sears gift cards or other house related gift cards. If someone doesn't want to give us a gift card then they are more than welcome to come up with their own gift as we cannot for the life of us think of anything. We are in house only mode and we aren't buying anything else- besides we don't want to have more stuff to move. LOL