The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2018 39 a cash-flow perspective.” At the very least, the rent should cover your mortgage plus expenses like home- owner association (HOA) fees and property manage- ment fees; you also want it to provide you with income. Unlike purchasing a primary residence, buying a second home is much more of a financial, dollars-and- cents decision. Make sure to consult a tax expert for the tax treatment of your potential second home. Before You Buy… “Eyes and ears on the ground are criti- cal in purchasing a home from a distance,” says Connell. Besides your real estate agent, ask a friend or family member whose opinion you value to go and look at the homes for you: “Have them Facetime you while they walk through the house, and stand outside so you can hear the sounds and traffic.” Don’t ask your real estate agent to tell you if a specific school is “good” or a neighborhood is “safe,” advises Stowe. “We’re just not allowed to make those kinds of judgment calls, and we can get in big trouble with fair housing laws if we do.”What your Realtor should do, she says, is look up statistics on schools and crime. They should also “take video and pictures of the surrounding areas to let prospective buyers make their own judge- ments.” When you’re starting the process, Rosenbaum advises you to gather your paystubs, W-2s, two years of tax returns, two months of bank and brokerage statements, travel orders if you’re moving soon and financial informa- tion for any other property you own, such as mortgage statements, HOA fees, taxes and insurance forms. You can do it all electronically if you’re organized. When Stowe did her own paperwork, she says, “we signed overseas, had the American Citizen Services officer notarize, scanned the documents and couriered them to the lender. I would think that if we could do it from Dhaka, people could do it from almost anywhere.” Rosenbaum agrees that closing from overseas is doable. “We just closed for a Foreign Service client in nine days from start to finish, all while she was overseas,” he says. “She never saw the house in person; I’ve never met her; and it was all done electronically.” —Donna Gorman Lynne Skeirik, currently the consul general in Paris, spent 15 years looking at homes online with her husband before they found a home in Maine, near where she grew up. “At the 10-year point, at the 15-year point, we went out with a Realtor to look,” says Skei- rik. “My husband did a tremen- dous amount of research. Schools were not an issue for us, but we wanted to keep expenses down, so we looked for places with low property taxes.” In the end, advises Skeirik, “you have to find the place that you fall in love with.” “I think you need to really be careful about where you decide to buy,” she continues. The house they eventually chose will also serve as their retirement home, so they needed to think about what would work for them now and into the next decade. “We got very lucky with this place. We didn’t want to be too isolated because we want to be able to age in this house. It’s a long winter in Maine, and we don’t want to have to trek out.” Have an Emergency Plan Dave and Shannon, a fifth- tour couple currently serving in Port-au-Prince, bought a house near family in Texas. Shannon spent one entire summer renovating the house so it would be exactly what she wanted when they came home for R&R the following summer. But just one week before they were scheduled to fly home, the hose connecting the toilet tank to the wall burst. Says Shannon, “That tiny hose dumped more than 5,000 gallons of water into our 1,246-square-foot house in under 10 hours.” A neighbor noticed water coming out of the house through the walls and running down the foundation. He cut off the water at the curb and called for help. “If you buy a house,” says Shannon, “make sure you turn off All of the officers and family members interviewed for this story recommend buying in an area with which you are very familiar.