Shibaguyz
Going to poke my head back in because I can’t be quiet anymore… I’ll say the first thing that will tick off half of you then I’ll say the second thing that will tick off the other half.
I don’t always agree with the WAY a lot of people post their comments on these forums. I think most of it sounds like a bunch of name calling and neener neener. However, there are some valid points if you can weed through that garbage… and I’m talking from BOTH sides.
Yes, people get into unfortunate circumstances. Yes, bad things happen that are out of our control. We know that just about as well as anyone. It’s relative to talk about what is “bad” or a “bad circumstance.” But we all have choices to make once we get into those circumstances and that is up to the individual as to how they deal with it and not something for anyone else to judge.
However…
As for our circumstances, we wanted to buy. We wanted to not have to buy a starter house and just wanted to get into the house we would retire in and there it would be. That couldn’t happen at the time. So we whined about the housing market and how it wasn’t fair and we griped and complained. Fat lot of good that did us. Our landlord raised the rent on us and charged us more for parking. More complaining.
Then we took our heads out of the sand. A friend gave us a book called “The Automatic Millionaire.” Don’t care if you like the guy or not, but we INSTANTLY made changes in our financial planning situation that put us on the track to having a real retirement and real savings. That lead us to buy another of his books “The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner.” I am not exaggerating when I tell you that one year later we were in our home.
It wasn’t easy, it took sacrifices… a LOT of sacrifices (again, a relative thing therefore different for everyone). But we were able to put together a financial profile within a year that gave us the chance to buy our first home. We are not wealthy. We did not have perfect credit. We did not take out one of those horrid zero-down loans. But, we did not pay $45K for our downpayment. That, as we found out, was pretty antiquated thinking and it was the re-education we went through that showed us how to do it.
I’m saying all of this because I don’t want some renter reading this to think that there are NO options out there for them. In my opinion, it is better to rent than to own so that the money is going back in my pocket and toward my investments. Again, go back to the top of this if you’re hacked off now and re-read what I said about everyone’s circumstances being different. I would just hate for someone to be reading this and think there is no way out if they feel like they HAVE TO rent. Believe me, we thought the same thing and lived that way for years because we were stuck in our own ego of self pity about the housing market.
But you can get out if you want to. It just takes time. And, yes, you might have to give up your expensive coffee habit for a while and you might have to take public transportation instead of driving that car everywhere or you might have to work a second job or a heck of a lot of overtime. You might even have to stop going out to eat as much and put as much money away as possible until you have enough $$ wrangled away to make up for your other deficiencies. But, if it is that important to you to own your own home, then you will gladly do those things and not think twice about the value of making those decisions.
I hope that this is not interpreted as being “holier than thou” or “elitist” in any way. If it is, then so be it. We worked our butts off to get what we have and to have what we want. Yes, it could all disappear in a flash and that is why we work equally as hard on making sure that our ego is not tying up our self worth in our material possessions. And, for now, we are going to enjoy it without fearing every day that it will be taken away.
Thank you for indulging my horribly loooong post. I know I said I was going to stay out of it with all of the name calling and such going on in this post but I figure if you all can do that, maybe it’s okay for me to post equally passionately in the positive side of things to offer another option for people out there read this that might get discouraged about buying a home.