Day 17: Home Sweet, Home My Gosh!
by Edward Smith
22 Jul 2020
Living in a House of Charm Filled with Fear
Our first house was very charming.
It also stressed us into near submission.
If we had just been paying our mortgage with nothing extra, the cost of doing it would have been close to about 35 percent of our take home income.
We were better then that! Since we wanted to pay off the house in fifteen years, we decided to pay extra each month on top of what was required. That number amounted to around 50 percent of what we were both taking home every month. We offset that by living small. Have you ever wanted to live in a nut house? What we were doing was working, but it was crazy!
Delaying Gratification For Big Dreams
We were willing to do this crazy thing though, because we had a dream to beat the odds and we wanted to own the house in it's entirety as soon as possible.
My job was starting to look shaky after we signed the mortgage, and we didn't think we'd have long term job security to look forward to. So our intention here was to use my job to push ourselves forward as fast as possible through the mess, in the hopes we'd beat things before things got messy. It wasn't a totally bad idea, but doing it in practice was painful to maintain and it kept us from doing a lot of other fun things.
Worse, to make any of it work both of us had to keep our jobs. Our kids had to go daycare, and there was no room for job loss in the plan whatsoever. We were living on a knife's edge, knowing full well we could slip at any moment.
We knew as soon as one of us lost their job, we'd probably end up having to sell the house or risk losing the house to foreclosure. I think we were kind of okay with that. It would have given us an easy out, and renting wasn't looking entirely bad anymore.
Little did we know, the decision to pay more each month above what the mortgage statement said, actually was really smart and it ended up saving us later, but we wouldn't know that at the time. In fact, we wouldn't find out for another five years.
Seeing the Warning Signs at Work
At the time of my new house purchase, I was working in a place where people got fired constantly. It usually happened for the smallest of infractions.
When I worked there, the average life expectancy of an employee was around two years. We joked about it, but it wasn't really funny. I witnessed hundreds of strangers and friends get fired and walked out the door. When you weren't ignoring it, it sometimes felt like death row. You knew it was just a matter of time.
Many of those fired were extremely talented, qualified people and leaders with years of experience in their given career field. These were not stupid people. They were the best of the best. In any other place, they would have been lauded as super stars and would have been taken care of.
Many of them had walked away from their own companies as CEOs to work here, because the place was unlike any other place around and it was exciting.
At this place though, they were just another expendable person being walked out the door by a burly security guard when something would inevitably go wrong. When we closed on our house I was at my two year mark. I wasn't a super star, and my degree wasn't even in something that related to what I was doing. I had sneaked my way in, using a temp agency. My lack of experience was starting to show.
We had no illusions.
We thought about it all of the time.
The sad thing, is we both had good paying technical jobs. We were making well above the national average for people bringing home paychecks, and we knew people in other parts of the country making about the same thing as we were that were living easier lives then we were, for about half the cost. We felt very stupid and stuck.
Then something happened, and we were able to break free and correct everything. It turned out some of our other financial decisions had been good ones, and they came to our rescue during our hour of need.
Don't Get Stuck by Stupid!
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