Homeownership Budget Workbook: Building a Complete Cost Plan

A mortgage pre-approval tells you what a lender will lend. A complete homeownership budget tells you what you can actually afford. This course provides the worksheets and step-by-step process to build a full annual cost plan for a specific property, going well beyond PITI to capture every significant recurring and irregular expense. By the end of this course you will be able to produce a written, property-specific annual homeownership budget that includes all major cost categories, a funded maintenance reserve, and a scenario analysis for a major unexpected repair. What you will learn: - How to look up property tax history for a specific address and project the bill after a change of ownership assessment - A coverage checklist for homeowners insurance: liability limits, dwelling replacement value, personal property, and optional riders - How to build a maintenance reserve: estimating system ages, replacement costs, and annual contribution needed to fund each item - An HOA fee analysis template: reviewing the HOA financial statements for underfunded reserves before purchasing in an HOA community - Utility estimation: how to request historical utility bills from the seller and adjust for your own usage patterns - An annual cost summary template that consolidates all categories into a monthly equivalent for cash-flow planning - A stress-test exercise: modeling the impact of a roof replacement or HVAC failure in year two of ownership Each of the eight worksheets in this course pairs a short instructional reading with blank fields and a fully completed example using a hypothetical property. You will work through each sheet in sequence, ending with a consolidated annual budget. A final reflection prompt asks you to compare your completed budget to your current housing cost and evaluate the gap. This course is designed for buyers who are under contract or in active home search and want to move from general affordability estimates to a specific, defensible cost plan. Suitable for those with no prior budgeting experience for real estate. This course is educational and does not substitute for professional advice from a tax assessor, insurance agent, or financial planner.