This Mistake Cost Us $1,000 as Homeowners

When you buy a home, you don't just take on the expense of a mortgage loan. You also take on the expense of maintaining your property, and that extends to the exterior.

Years ago, my husband and I noticed we had some dead trees in our backyard. We knew that if a bad storm blew in, those trees would be in danger of falling, causing damage to not only our property, but several neighbors' properties. We made what we thought was the right decision by paying to have them removed.

It turns out, a nuance in our property boundaries made it so we actually were not allowed to do that. And we wound up getting hit with a costly fine as a result.

When doing the right thing backfires on you

Part of our backyard is a conservation easement -- a special provision that was put into place before we bought our home to preserve that land. We knew that since we had an easement on our property, we were restricted from doing certain things to alter that land -- for example, putting in a shed or pool. Thankfully, neither were part of our plans, so it wasn't an issue until we discovered the dead trees and thought we were doing the responsible thing by removing them.

The terms of our conservation easement stated that removing any sort of vegetation was prohibited. And apparently in our case, that included dead trees that posed a hazard.

When our township found out that we'd had those trees removed, it proceeded to slap us with a fine. In the end, we had to pull $1,000 from our savings account to deal with it.

Now, had we wanted to pursue the matter legally, we probably would've had some recourse. The trees we removed posed a hazard, and while we knew we couldn't remove healthy trees from our easement, we potentially could've gotten an attorney to argue our case. But we also figured that the time and money we'd spend on a lawyer would equal or exceed the $1,000 we had to fork over, so it just wasn't worth our aggravation.

An important lesson learned

My husband and I only found that our property had conservation land on it when we pursued a landscaping project a few years after moving in. And the reason we didn't know about that easement beforehand was that we didn't carefully read our property survey before buying our home. That was actually our biggest mistake. Had we known about it, we probably would not have purchased our home because we've run into other issues with that easement as well.

If you're in the process of buying a home, make absolutely sure that you review your property survey carefully before finalizing that purchase. Experian says that your mortgage lender or title insurance company should be able to provide you with a copy.

In fact, you may be paying for a new property survey as part of your closing costs to put your mortgage into place. And so in that case, you absolutely deserve a look at that survey.

My husband and I learned the hard way that overlooking a major detail in the home-buying process can have consequences. Review your survey carefully to avoid a similar issue.