Have you ever felt free to define your life on your own terms? Well, this feeling is happening to me right now! After 14 years of living in Chicago, my family and I are making the move to Charlotte, N.C. this summer. My family and I are now part of the great migration of Blacks moving back to the South. Chicago has been deeply meaningful to me and I’ve loved my long season here. My brief words can’t adequately sum up all of my emotions for the city I’ve called home for so long. However, we are moving toward a better quality of life, which includes closer proximity to our family, access to good public schools for our young daughter, a real possibility for our dollars to stretch farther, and many more days of warmer weather throughout the year. We are moving away from the violence that has plagued Chicago, and the feelings of helplessness because we can’t do anything about the violence.

Given the remote and hybrid work arrangements of our day jobs, our move affords us the freedom to step into a new way of living irrespective of our employment situation. We are blessed beyond measure because we get the opportunity to define the life we want to live on our own terms — a truly wealthy experience!  

What might be stopping you from defining the life you want on your own terms? If you have gotten the taste of liberation that results from defining your life on your terms, what did you do ro enable your power? 

I’m not going to lie to you – Our home buying journey to the Charlotte metro area was a stressful one. Our offers to buy a house were declined six times before our 7th offer on a home was finally accepted. In going through the process, I want to share 3 Tips to buying a home in a hot market like Charlotte: 

• Pick an agent with a strong fit for you. Interview a handful of agents who could potentially help you get your next dream home, investment property, or anything in-between. Determine what factors are most important to you. Here are several characteristics that are important: deep expertise of the neighborhoods you want to live in, strong negotiation skills, breadth of relationships with other real estate agents, access to resources to help you end-to-end (e.g. mortgage lenders, home insurance agents, construction specialists, interior designers, etc.), a willingness to listen to what you want, and speed to act on new information and opportunities.  

• Get flexibility in financing approach. In hot markets like Charlotte, cash-offers rule the market. My husband and I were completely shocked as to how many offers we lost due to all-cash offers. I said to myself - “the majority of people do not have  hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around.” My intuition was right. Instead of using cash sitting in their accounts, homebuyers were utilizing services like Ribbon, which I wrote about late last year. In short, these services front the cash to the buyer for a “small” fee, buy the home with cash on the buyer’s behalf at closing, and then sell the home to the buyer who has a lender lined up to finance the transaction. As a result, you should employ a home buying strategy that provides flexibility on how you finance your home so that you can compete effectively with other buyers, and hopefully win out.  

• Be patient. In hot housing markets, it’s particularly easy to get swept up in the craze of the market. That said, hot markets often inflate housing prices, which means that you may end up paying more for the house than the house is currently worth. I encourage you to walk away if you need to do so, which is easier said than done, especially in an environment where you really like a home or feel pressure to move. The right house will find you and you will find it. One of the biggest things you can do is set appropriate expectations. For example, in hot markets, you should expect to make multiple offers before one of your offers is accepted. Also, if you have your list of must-haves and should-haves, the patience will be easier to come by because you know what you want.  Be kind to yourself in the process - the patience will pay off!  

A Wealthy Girl Corner

It’s women's history month and I leave you with some inspiration for your own journey, or someone who is close to you, on the homebuying adventure. Joanna Gaines, co-owner and co-founder of Magnolia said: 

Also, you can watch the recording of my Accelerate Yale talk with other prominent Black investors from the Yale community from our #BlackHistoryMonth conversation. We talked about the investment outlook for 2022 and key strategies for starting a business or entrepreneurial endeavor.