RIP Story: Sept 25th, 2024
I don’t have a fiction story for this image. I am filled with the memories of buying our own home and the stories of those who are trying to buy a home in a part of the world that was expensive when we bought and is more expensive now. The home buying process is a weird roller coaster. It is a simple conversation with yourself, or your partner is this is something you can afford. Then, you start looking at homes for sale. There is some cost calculation for what kind of mortgage you can afford, but the easy way would be to think about what you’re paying in rent and assume that is the level of mortgage you can afford.
Next you go to a realtor, or you go to open houses, and you look at homes. If this is the first home purchase, there is a lot of guesswork and compromise because you don’t know what it is like to live in that amount of space. You don’t know how the house functions or where things would go in the nooks and crannies of the home. There are moments that make the place feel right. I felt the ocean air blowing up the street when we were standing outside the front door. There was a roughly 10-year-old kid riding a scooter who said hello. After looking at numerous houses to this point and this that or the other being the wrong fit, it was wonderful to find something that lined up.
OMG, I left out the pre-approval process. The scam. The simple way to think about monthly payments is to think about your rent payment. Before we can know what homes we can look at, we need to know what the bank is willing to loan us. The scam is in the nervous moment before the loan officer tells you what they will offer you. I’ve done the math and we’ve looked online at home we like. “There is no way the bank will offer us enough to get the house we want,” I’m thinking to myself. Then we are told we can get a loan for $400k OVER what I calculated is the top end monthly payment we can afford. When we walked out of the meeting I was flipping back and forth between the idea that we could look at the homes we really wanted to and “No wonder there was a mortgage crisis.”
The onus of restraint is put on the home buyer and when you are a first-time home buyer there is excitement and desperation. This leads to a deadly line between partners “we can probably make that work?” Maybe they can, but the mortgage crisis suggests otherwise. I understand there are systems in place to prevent the same level of breakdown, but I came away from that meeting scared for how easy it was to get yourself in a position to have to manage housing costs that were clearly outside of your budget.
Once you make an offer there is the waiting and hoping that you get the acceptance call. Go through the escrow process, which has the feel of scammy too. There are lots of small checks that need to be written for this and that. I’m sure there are reasons for all the steps, but no one is explaining. It’s whirlwind and you just want the home. You get through all of that and at the end, you’re handed a set of keys, which ironically will work for all of a week because you will change your locks, but the trinkets that represent so much in your life are there, in your hand. You feel lucky and glad the process is over.
Home buying is another thing on the list of huge life decisions I don’t feel like there is enough guided knowledge for young people. There are tons of videos and blogs you can read and maybe there are simulators for the process online. I feel like a simulation in a school setting is the kind of learning that would be really helpful for those on the precipice of adulthood. “Your goal is to get a set of gets before the end of the semester. These are the people you need to talk to, and these are the steps you need to take.”
I’m glad we bought our house when we did. When I see images like this, I am pulled to those keys being placed in my hand. The picture we took in the realtor’s lobby. The great unknown and the “how did that happen” feeling. There isn’t a lot of room for fiction because the reality of what I experienced was so strong, both positive and negative.
Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow.
EPILOGUE: This may come across as sad or “woah is me” when I’m talking about buying a house. First world problems for sure. What makes me sad is that I barely felt equipped to handle all that needed to happen. I felt like there were questions I asked along the way where the answer was “not really spoken” by the people within the system. Specifically, I asked how the appraisal was to the dollar the same as the offer and how that felt unlikely. “How often does that happen?” and the answer was “always” and that didn’t seem weird to anyone involved on the money side. Why did I just write a check to an appraiser when we know what the amount will be? Home buying is a system, that in my experience, was clear as mud and had entirely too much moneyed interests on one side and poorly informed interests on the other. We were lucky and came out on the other side with a home. When I see this image, I am taken back to that time in my life.
