How couples avoid pitfalls while buying a home

BY DINA SANTORELLI | Special to Newsday

January 25, 2008

Vinny Versaggi installs a new lock set on the bedroom door as his wife, Nicole, watches. The Versaggis continue to work on improvements and to make the house theirs. (Newsday / Bill Davis / January 24, 2008)

After renting an apartment in Albertson for four years, Ian and Stacy Rousseau knew it was time to find a home of their own. They'd just had a baby, a son named Jack, and "we were just outgrowing the place," explains Ian.

Last month, after a search that took about a year-and-a-half, the family moved into an expanded cape in south Bellmore, bought for $430,000. "It took a while," says Ian, 31, a director of dining services for Brookdale Hallmark of Battery Park City. "The process of getting a mortgage was a nightmare. For first-time home buyers, it can be really horrible."

Weathering the market

Adds Stacy Rousseau, 31, an accounting manager for Cablevision: "Right around that time, in early 2007, the market was changing. It was a good time to buy because the prices were coming down, but it was difficult because of the things that were happening with the mortgage companies."

And with the beginning fallout from the come-one-come-all, no-interest mortgage craze, lenders had begun to demand more stringent qualifications for home buyers.

The Rousseaus say they feared they would not be approved once they found the home they wanted. "They were saying it would be hard unless you put 20 percent down," says Stacy. "We didn't have the 20 percent to put down - it was a nerve-racking thing."

Buying a house as a couple has always been stressful. Not only are they making decisions that will affect the rest of their lives - not to mention their current or future children's - but many times they are basing those decisions on less-than-perfect circumstances, like the downturn in the housing market.

As it is, some 75 percent of Americans point to money and work as the leading causes of stress (a dramatic rise from 59 percent in 2006), with a little more than half citing rent or mortgage costs as specific sources of stress, according to a poll last year by the American Psychological Association.

With the stress of the search for a home, the Rousseaus began to bicker - Stacy wanted to get out of the apartment right away, and Ian suggested waiting a little longer until the volatility of the market waned. Plus, Stacyhad entered the unpaid portion of her maternity leave. The couple began to fall behind on a few bills, causing their credit scores to go down.

"We didn't have bad credit, but not the best," she said, "and if you didn't have perfect credit, then you better have had 20 percent to put down, which we didn't."

"Bills started piling up, our credit was messed up - it was just a nightmare," Ian Rousseau says. "We found ourselves arguing because of the stress."

The Rousseaus managed the stress by spending time with their son, which Ian says, made them work harder to get through the tension of the house search.

"The end result was our son, Jack, needed a house," says Ian. "That's what everyone wants. I grew up in Merrick, and my wife grew up in Bayside, and she never had a house before. That's what I wanted to do for her and my son."

With assistance from Ian's parents, they finally were able to come up with the 20 percent.

Third house in five years

For Jo-Ann and Eric Harkin, the stress of buying a home was coupled with the stress of selling a home.

"This is our third house in five years," says Jo-Ann Harkin, 29, a stay-home mother, of their front-to-back split in Wantagh, on which they closed in November and paid $418,000. "We were pretty stressed. We got married, then we had a baby, now I'm pregnant again."

The couple started out with a ranch in Westbury, where she grew up, "and we thought we'd stay there," she says. "But a bigger house came up for sale, a cape, a couple of blocks away; it was a friend of the family and we got a good deal."

The Harkins moved this last time because they liked the Wantagh school district, Jo-Ann says, and it was a chance for them to be close to family members who live there.

Another stress factor: Eric Harkin gutted the first two homes, Jo-Ann says. "It drove us crazy," she says of the constant packing up, moving and renovating, "but now we're settled, and we're a lot happier being in this house."