MISTAKES WERE MADE
That Time I Almost Died at Home for A House Note
Overextended, overworked, and overwhelmed
“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
I have been reading about how the younger generations are being priced out of the housing market by both the costs and the interest rates. Because homes have become so expensive, young people cannot save the amount of money needed to meet even a 10% down payment. They are priced out of the market by both the high-interest rate and the cash required to become homeowners. It reminded me of when I and my husband made a horrific decision to buy a home we could not afford.
When my spouse and I brought a house in California, we overextended ourselves. We sold our first home in Connecticut and rolled over the cash from the sale and our savings to the new house. We found a house we fell in love with, which was way over our budget.
The house was a tri-level four-bedroom, three-bath built into the side of a hill. There was a wonderful primary bedroom with a sliding glass door that opened to a jacuzzi tub that overlooked a stunning valley. The house had purple ice plants on all sides with soaring tall pines right next to the house. The house looked like a picture postcard. It was our house. We had a terrible real estate agent who eagerly assisted us in getting into deep financial trouble.
We put down every dollar of the $60K from the CT house and the money we saved. My new company brought down the mortgage cost by 2 full points. We took an owner-financed second loan of $27K.
To afford the purchase, we started working at least 50 hours on our demanding full-time engineering jobs. Evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays were spent working at the H&R Block. We cashed in our vacations and sick time for cash instead of being sick and taking time off. We did all of this and were the parents of two children. We were working our young asses off.
This meant we took no time off in two years, but we were young, strong, and out of our minds. We did not miss a day of work in two years. Always there, always working to get promoted and make more money, which we needed. Our house honed our ambitions. This was the same house we spent little to no time in.
One week, I got sick. I woke up on Monday with a sour stomach. By Wednesday, I was curled up with my head in my hands in the company bathroom. I barely made it home before becoming very ill. Thursday morning, I was lying on my bed in a fetal position when my husband came downstairs to kiss me goodbye for work. He kissed me and went back upstairs to get the kids out to school, normally my job in the mornings.
Minutes later, he came back downstairs and told me he called into work. He said I looked too bad for him to leave. We called our family doctor who agreed to see me. I would need to wait in the office for someone to cancel or delay their appointment. Still in my nightclothes, he bundled me into the car and took me to the office. When we got to the office, they did not make us wait, instead sending me straight back into one of the open exam rooms. I guess I looked damn bad.
In the exam room, the doctor pressed and poked me, frowning more and more, the more he touched me. I had a temperature, my pulse was racing, and I could barely talk. Then he did something I had not seen before. He told us I had two options: he could provide me with antibiotics, and I could go home or I could go to the hospital. I unequivocally told them I wanted to go home. My husband and my doctor said, “OK.”
The next thing I knew, I was pulling up to the hospital with my doctor’s colleagues meeting me there. My spouse put me in a wheelchair, and they rolled me in. I remember nothing else for three days. My honey told me I had passed out in the wheelchair. They started running IV broad-spectrum antibiotics in me as whatever was attacking me was winning. There was no time to figure it out, so they took cultures and started the IV while they waited for the cultures to grow. The cultures would enable the lab to identify specifically what my infection was.
When woke up, my spouse was curled in the hospital bed with me. Not only had I missed four days of work, but he missed four days with me. The first words out of my mouth where I wanted to go home, which made both him and my nurse laugh. I was in the hospital another two days before they let me out and off work for another week.
The doctor told us it was a good thing my husband decided he would stay home and take me to the doctor as I would have laid there all day until he came home from his second job. There was no telling what condition I would have been in. Jim Henson passed away because he had some sort of infection. He waited too long and died before treatment could save him.
In a few years, we worked hard enough and got promoted and an increase in salary. We gave up our second jobs and lived like normal humans again. The lesson we learned served us well the rest of our lives. If you financially strain yourselves, the only people that pay that cost is you. Everyone around you who will benefit from your bad decisions will let you continue that path. In fact, they may encourage you.
My advice to young people is to make home-buying decisions carefully — know what you are signing up for and be prepared to make the sacrifices. Take your time and find the best deals you can.
It is ok to take a bad deal as long as you fully understand the implications of what you have signed up for. Know in advance what your escape plan will be. An escape plan is a desperate measure to preclude disaster such as surrendering the house to the mortgage holder and losing the equity you have in the home.
Good luck finding your house in this sellers’ market. There is nothing like owning your own home but understand the risks.
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