Can you afford to buy a home? The first person you’ll want to talk with about your qualification will obviously be a lender or real estate agent. Once you find out your buying power, then you need to calculate what new expenses you’ll have once you move out of the apartment and into your first home.

Depending on your personal tastes and requirements, you could put out thousands of dollars more per year that you don’t spend now in your rental. Some of your monthly charges will head upward and some down.

If you’re in a condominium, for instance, your condo fee will now be spread over several service providers instead of through one middle man (your condo association). Whereas all your trash, snow removal, water and some utilities may have been included in your monthly fee, now you’ll have to track those expenses separately and pay for them.

Here are some expenses you need to watch out for:

UTILITIES

The U.S. Department of Energy (www.Energy.gov) reports the average household spent $1,338 for energy in 1997 (the last time those numbers were tabulated). Total annual energy expenditures per household were highest in the Northeast ($1,644) and lowest in the West ($1,014).

Electricity accounted for 35 percent of all the energy consumed in U.S. households in 1997 compared to 23 percent in 1978

For gas users, your average annual expense should have increased by nearly 35 percent by 2001. The average gas household paid out $568 in 1997 and would have paid $765 at 2001 prices, according to DOE estimates.

The above two expenses will obviously increase according to your personal usage. However, they’ll definitely jump if your move is from a two-bedroom condo to a three-bedroom, two-bath single-family home. When I moved from my all-electric condo a few years back to an all-electric single-family house, my bill went up about $100 per month ($200 more for high-energy use periods).

The phone is part of the utilities bill and that must be included in your tabulation of expenses, however, it shouldn’t increase the same way as the above utilities. More than likely, if you’re using the same telephone services in the single-family as you did in the condo, you’re charges should be the same if you stay with the same phone company.

Nevertheless, in researching this column, I did find some very interesting charges accompanied on the phone bill that are more the government’s fault than the all-powerful telephone conglomerates.

WRC-TV Channel 4, the Washington, D.C. NBC affiliate, looked over the phone bill issue entirely and did a great job in explaining how all the little charges on your bill add up. The following information is from a report aired originally on WRC-TV and covers charges by Verizon to subscribers in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. Your local charges may differ.

Calls to Verizon, long distance companies and the FCC provided the following information about your phone bill:

The Federal subscriber line charge, pays Verizon about $4 per month to cover the cost of running phone lines to your house and connecting you to the rest of the world.

Published: September 20, 2002

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Mr. Carr has covered real estate since 1989. He is the author of Real Estate Investing Made Simple. Got a personal real estate issue? Post your questions and comments at Anthony’s blog: commonsenserealestate.blogspot.com.