Why We've Decided To Buy A House
I remember very very early on in our dating relationship, my husband and I talking about things in the future — i.e. kids, home, work, marriage, etc. — and we were both pretty certain we’d never buy a home. Neither of us subscribed to the thinking that rent was a waster and we didn’t want to be saddled with all the maintenance and responsibility that went into owning, as oppose to renting.
For context — when we started dating, I was 26 and he was 23.
Our point of views honestly never changed. For both of us there was also the unspoken — but we knew — belief that we couldn’t ever be homeowners. We didn’t know much about the process, but we knew we were two twenty somethings that were living check to check in NYC. As we got older, we got better, but it really just never entered our thinking as a possibility.
Fast forward…
…a baby
…marriage
…a cross country move
While we never fully jumped onto the home buying bandwagon, it came up in conversations a bit more frequently — be it from frustration with something in our apartment, or because we needed all of our slow (but steady) financial strides to mean something.
Then came 2020.
By the way… it’s now 8 years later, so my husband and I are now 31 and 34, respectively.
Admittedly I had a home on my vision board for the new year — our home buying conversations were becoming a thing and we found ourselves wondering about “what’s next” for our family…stay in Washington? …move back East? We weren’t sure but we knew renting in perpetuity was no longer an option.
By the second quarter of 2020, personally, I was juggling being a “single mom” with my husband deployed, the beginnings of my second new job in a year, COVID-19 forcing us all into quarantine, and witnessing a modern day civil rights movement. One or two of these events may not have done much for changing my mind, but all of em together… well I quickly went from, “it’d be nice to own my home” — hence the vision board — to “I want to own a home!”
The tipping point?
During all of the civil unrest — p.s. not a new conversation — there was so much talk around home ownership in America. I was suddenly learning so much about equity and generational wealth and racial disparities in the housing market. Up to this moment, these are conversations I was actively part of and all the information hit me like a ton of bricks but in a good way…it was a wake up call. On July 7th, I actually declared on my IG stories that I wanted to be a homeowner by Fall 2021 and that I was manifesting my new home via Pinterest. Halfway around the world, unbeknownst to me, my husband was taking military mandated finance courses on #allthethings including — you guessed it — home ownership!
By the time we reunited — 320+ days later — we were both fully committed to the idea of home ownership. So why the change of heart?
We’ve physically and mentally outgrown renting
As a couple, my husband and I have been renting — happily — for the better part of a decade. As we’ve gotten older, and after three apartments together, we’ve realized the kind of home life we want, we will only get by owning. It’s not about apartment versus house — it’s about the freedom of ownership. Will it require some work on our part? For sure! But the point is now we can get what we want, how we want, when & where we want.
Baby girl’s present… and future
Currently baby girl loves to get into things — she’s curious, loves to play pretend, and being outside is her happy place. Were we able to nurture all of that here? Yes. Bu as she gets older — a lesson learned, in part, thanks to COVID-19 — she’ll crave space that here will never give her…not really at least. And for her future self, we are thinking about her legacy. All the lessons I received this year on generational wealth motivated me to want to give her what our parents couldn’t give us — equity.
It was our natural next step
My husband’s return home also gave us some real clarity on where our lives were headed. This gave us the confidence to want to put down roots and the clear sense of where we’d be doing that…at least for the next 3 to 5 years. For where we are in life, home ownership was really our “what’s next?”
So what is next?
Well we’ve been in the throws of learning as much as possible and preparing ourselves for the inevitable transition, and while I can’t promise any real time updates, I am excited to eventually tell y’all when we’re homeowners…and with that, so much new design content.
