In honor of spooky season, I’ll be sharing a few scary financial stories I’ve gone through.
All of them are real!
Years ago, I bought my first house.
I thought it was the “right” thing to do since I had a stable job and I was managing to save enough money on a monthly basis to come up with a down payment. (Mathematically, it was most definitely NOT the “right” thing to do financially.)
I put down 3.5% for the down payment, since that was the minimum for an FHA loan. Those loans are usually used by buyers in the U.S. with not so great credit.
My credit was amazing, but I think the fees were lower with this loan, according to my mortgage broker at the time. Looking back, I’m not sure if that was true.
Anyway, I got the house and I had cash left over after the closing. So naturally, I did what every young person who just bought a whole bunch of debt does….buy new furniture.
That in itself, is not a terrible thing. So long as you still have an emergency fund for when something goes wrong with your lovely new home. Not if something goes wrong, but when something goes wrong.
With houses, it is always just a matter of time.
So anyway, after the furniture purchase, which to my credit was only my living room: I had no more savings left. I kept everything else from my apartment and continued to use it for ages. The bed I had back then was the same bed I had up until about a year and a half ago.
So I was responsible in some ways, I think I just felt like I needed a living room because in my apartment all I had was a crappy little futon. Hard as a rock!
About a month into moving in, in the middle of July, in Texas: the A/C gives out!
Now, it’s Texas so it’s basically hell in the summer. There’s no: let’s just open up the windows and deal with it until we have a little more cash.
Nope! No A/C means I will not sleep…
At that point, I had absolutely zero dollars left in my savings account so I ended up having to finance it.
I found a small company who installed the indoor and outdoor unit for about $4,800. I thought that was a good deal, but good deal or not I just had no money to pay for it.
I ended up putting it on a new credit card so I could take advantage of the introductory 0% interest rate and pay it off over the course of a year and a half.
I did everything I could to pay it off during that 0% interest time, but now my savings ability had diminished because my rent was no longer $600….now I was having to pay $1,400 a month for this mortgage!
I eventually did get it paid off, but it took a lot of side gigs to bring this down since this was NOT the only thing that went wrong in my house.
I have tons of scary stories regarding my house!
Do I regret purchasing the house?
No, actually. The house has been a pain in the ass, no doubt. However, it has also been the reason why I was able to keep my expenses low after my divorce and seriously pay down debt. All without having to move.
Since the house has extra bedrooms, I rented them out and was able to live very cheaply, while still building equity. It was also the reason why I ended up saving so much, because I know things can go wrong so I need to be prepared.
Plus, I love the location. It’s close to everything I need and I really like that my neighborhood is so quiet.
I’ve enjoyed living here because I’ve felt like it was truly my own. When I lived in apartments, I rarely even unpacked my decorative stuff since I figured I’d leave in a year, but now I’ve made my home look lovely and I truly feel at peace here.
Now that I am making a little more money, I’m going to work on making it look even nicer so that I can love the home I come back to every evening.
Biggest Takeaway
Always have an emergency fund! (And don’t use it for furniture!)
Leave a Reply