we bought a house
Let’s get into it. If you follow me online or know me in real life, you know this because I literally cannot talk about anything else… but in case you missed it, WE BOUGHT A HOUSE. It’s still surreal to speak that out loud. It’s been a long journey to get here, but I’ll try to sum it up as best I can.
Mac has had a dream of buying a home for many years. While I was deep in my personal finance journey, I was on the fence about home ownership. If you look at the math, you are usually better off renting and investing the difference in the stock market. I was laser focused on investing as much money, as early as possible. I wanted to take advantage of compound interest to set my future self up.
We looked at our first house last summer, so almost 1.5 years ago. It was a funky little house just a few blocks from us so we figured, “Why not?” Mac called an old buddy of his from his Real Estate days. Parker showed us the house. I loved it, but it was a very unique layout that would make it challenging to re-sell to the average buyer. We weren’t in any position to buy a house at that time, so we put the sell sheet on our fridge as a sort of vision board, and then we went on with our lives.
I hit a pretty big milestone (over $200k invested) this year. Simultaneously, I experienced a lot of hardship in my personal life. Safety, security, and peace became my new North Star. Buying a home now felt like the right emotional decision for us. Okay, so we decided we were going to seriously look for a house. At this point, we didn’t think a single detached home was in the realm of possibility. We knew we didn’t want to buy a condo, so we began looking at townhomes.
We narrowed in on one area of the city. It seemed perfect for us. It was right near the river with access to nature/a long walking path, perfect for runs. It was quiet, centrally located, and right in our price point. We saw ~6 units in this complex, and we were waiting for the “perfect one” to come up.
Our realtor Parker (who BTW has been absolutely incredible), told us to run the numbers and consider looking at single detached homes. At this time we hadn’t gotten pre-approved for our mortgage so we were going off our own calculations of what we could afford. When we ran the numbers, considering condo fees (some condo fees were upwards of $800 a month!), it was clear that a $550,000 condo would equal similar monthly payments to a $700,000 single detached home. The difference being that a detached home has much better re-sale potential value.
I was nervous because the idea of buying a whole ass house was daunting. We went through with getting pre-approved for a mortgage through a mortgage broker and to our surprise, we were pre-approved for almost $1 million. We were shocked. We also knew that we did NOT want to buy a house of this value. We began looking at detached homes.
Now that we moved on from townhomes in that one particular complex, we had to make some decisions about location. We wanted to be central-ish. We didn’t want to live in the real ‘burbs. But these nice, central neighbourhoods can be very expensive. So we decided on a few neighbourhoods and Parker set us up on a search so that every morning at 8 am, we would receive listings in our price range in those specific neighbourhoods. It was honestly a lot of fun to wake up every day and see what was out there.
Of the neighbourhoods, one in particular quickly became our favourite. My sister and her family live there, so in addition to the potential of being close to them, they can vouch for the neighbourhood and they adore it. We looked at probably 5 homes in this neighbourhood and we fell in love with one.
In August, we put an offer in on what we thought was our dream home. Thing is, a lot of other people also thought it was their dream home. We were 1 of 4 offers. We submitted our offer that afternoon, and the sellers were going to sit down and choose from all four offers after dinner. It was a weird feeling waiting to hear back, because we were either going to be disappointed OR that was day that we were going to buy a house. Our offer wasn’t selected. I cried. Thankfully, we were able to move on emotionally pretty quick.
Then came 3 months of not seeing even one house. The market was dry, and nothing that we were interested in came available. We felt discouraged, and at this point, we thought that our dream of moving into our new home before Christmas wasn’t going to happen. We also didn’t want to move in the dead of Winter so we were looking at moving maybe next Spring?
Randomly in October, 3 homes in a neighbourhood that we hadn’t considered yet (we thought we couldn’t afford it TBH) caught our eye. They were all similar homes but at different price points because they were different levels of renovated.
We walked into the third home, and we bought knew it was going to be ours. I was frantically taking videos because I just knew we would be referencing them. We made a decision pretty quickly to put in an offer. Parker helped us pick a price. The seller came back and wanted to split the difference, so we reached a price that both parties were happy with. We were ecstatic, and I thought the hard part was over. Boy was I wrong.
Then came a very intense week. We had two conditions to clear: the home inspection and financing. We knew we were pre-approved for our mortgage so we felt confident in that but we didn’t know what the home inspection would uncover. The house is 60 years old after all.
The home inspection went well. There were ~60 items that he found that required attention, but the main things like the roof, sewer line, etc. all passed so we were pleased. We uncovered that we needed to replace the hot water tank and do some electrical work so we were looking at close to $10k in necessary repairs as soon as we moved in. We went back to the seller to ask for $4k off the sale price, and we met in the middle at $2k. Anything helps, and this was our house so we were going to go through with it even if the seller didn’t reduce the sale price at all.
We cleared conditions, woo! Again, I thought the hard part was over but it was not HAHA. Next: we had to finalize our mortgage, move a shit ton of money out of investments for our down payment, book both a move in and move out clean, book movers, acquire home insurance, give our landlord notice, switch our utilities, and many more to-do list items.
At this point, we shared the news with our friends and family. We felt validated with our choice and we felt the love and celebration from our loved ones. We just wanted to move in, but we had a lot of work to do. In these 2 weeks, Mac and I both got hit with a flu (at different times, thank goodness). While one of us was sick, the other kept things moving along. This was a difficult time between work, illness and a long house to-do list, but we made it through.
Now, we are almost at the end of our to-do list, and our possession day is in 3 days. We couldn’t be more excited to get into our new house, decorate for Christmas, and get settled. It’s been a whirlwind of a process but I am proud of how we have navigated every challenge that has come up.
I have been documenting this process on my YouTube channel for a couple of reasons. I want to be able to look back on this time in our lives, and I wanted to share some of the ups and downs with my audience, because it’s a lot more involved that I even imagined.
All for now!!!!