How to pay for your kitchen remodel

Welcome to the show. Today we are talking about something that hits close to home, literally. If you have been thinking about a kitchen renovation, you know it is the room where everything happens. When it goes well, your mornings run smoother, you are using one pan instead of three, and your guests actually hang out around the island. But we have to be real about the trade-off. You are looking at losing your kitchen for anywhere from four to ten weeks. That depends on whether you are just swapping out surfaces or tearing everything down and changing the layout. Then there is the bill. A typical kitchen remodel in the US runs around eighteen thousand dollars. That price tag usually comes down to the cabinets, the stone, and the appliances way more than it comes down to what you pay the workers. If you are trying to save a little on the timing, look at late winter. Contractors get busy during the holidays, but their calendars open up once that rush dies down. Shops also tend to run promotions on tile, flooring, and cabinets around this time just to clear out their old inventory. If you book your quotes in January or February, you get a few advantages. You can compare three different bids side by side, use those numbers to negotiate, and pick a date to start in the spring or early summer when you are actually ready for the mess. Now, let’s talk about how to pay for it. You might see credit cards offering zero percent interest for eighteen months on big purchases. Remember, that is a deadline, not free money. If you have any balance left on that card when the period ends, you start paying interest at the standard rate. In a lot of cases, that interest is retroactive, meaning they go back and charge you interest on the whole amount from the day you bought it. If you go this route, build a payoff plan before you order a single cabinet. Make sure the total cost, plus your contingency fund for any surprises that pop up during construction, fits inside a window you can realistically pay off. Always have a plan for how you are going to clear the debt before the clock runs out. If you want to look over the details or see where this info came from, head over to voatlas.com for the written version.