Tales of a First-Time Home Buyer: Buyers Credit Check Arrives!
Hallelujah!
That’s what my wife and I have been saying for the last 24 hours. You would say it too if you found one of these in your mailbox.
Yes, that’s right, we received our first-time homebuyer’s tax credit check from the IRS in the mail yesterday. We got the full $8,000, plus interest. Very nice. It took approximately six weeks to finally receive the check after I filed the addendum to our 2009 taxes. Filing the addendum was actually quite easy; finding out exactly what forms I needed was the more difficult part.
If you are filing an addendum to the previous year’s taxes, you will need to fill out two forms, one for the addendum, IRS Form 1040X, and one for the first-time homebuyer’s tax credit; IRS Form 5405. If you are applying for the first-time homebuyer’s tax credit on your 2010 taxes, you only need the IRS Form 5405. You will also need a purchase agreement for the home ratified prior to April 30, 2010, as well as a settlement statement, such as a HUD-1 form, ratified prior to June 30, 2010.
I did all of this during the first week of July. I am by no means a tax expert, I did all of this research myself and made sure I got it right. I obtained a fully ratified purchase agreement and a fully ratified HUD-1 settlement statement from NV Homes, who was both the builder and mortgage company for our home. I didn’t take any chances, I mailed every page of every document, even the addendum pages, to make sure the IRS had everything they needed. The IRS claims is will take 30-90 days to receive your credit, as long as all calculations and forms are entered correctly and the required documents are properly enclosed. For us it took 42 days.
So what are we going to do with the money? We could take a vacation, buy things for the house, throw a huge party, throw it all down on red for one turn of the roulette wheel in Vegas… or we could do something entirely responsible and utterly boring: put it in the savings account and stare at it. Yeah, that’s right. You know you’re old and boring when you get a huge check in the mail and the only thing you want to do with it is stick it in the savings account and forget about it.
We have a master plan, one which we initially conceived way back in January when we singed our lives away on the dotted line. We have followed this grand plan from its inception to the present. We will save this money until we get our 2010 tax return, and then we will buy my wife a new car. New cars are exciting, right? I’m sure she’ll be excited, as she will be able to get anything she wants, within reason, and then we’ll both have relatively new cars as well as a new house.
I love it when a plan comes together.
