TURNING YOUR NEW HOUSE INTO A HOME

Congratulations! After many years of renting a condo, apartment, room, or bedspace, you have finally acquired your own house. The monthly mortgage payments for a bank or lease payments for a landlord are now part of the past. Instead of your family home, you can now put your new house's location as your "permanent address" when filling out forms. All is good, right?

- Chris Noel Hidalgo

While you’ve accomplished the major milestone of owning a house, you still have to put in the effort and money necessary to make it a home. After all, home is what you make it. If your bank account’s feeling a bit drained, a loan is a great way for you to gather the funds necessary for any renovations and furnishing you want to do. Besides paving the path towards your dream home’s bells and whistles, here are other reasons why getting a mortgage for your home ownership goals is more advantageous than you think.

You can customize your home to your liking

One of the perks of owning your own home is that you are free to customize it how you want. When you lease a place, you are fairly limited in terms of what you can do to the property. You most likely cannot paint the walls a different color. You can’t install tiles or new flooring. You can’t change the layout of the space. You can’t drill or hammer nails into the walls. You can’t add rooms or floors. Some landlords even go as far as forbidding the use of adhesives on any surface. If you are able to do any of these and you decide to move out, you either have to restore the property to its condition when you moved in or forfeit the improvements in favor of the landlord. In both cases, it’s your hard-earned money down the drain.