I want to buy a house, but I'm scared

I think I’m going to buy a house! Over the coming months, Humdrum will be a series of essays about this home-buying journey. Topics include, getting comfortable with dropping all my savings on a piece property, choosing where to live, wtf is a mortgage/is it a scam, and more! Enjoy Part 1, where I worry-debate over the pros and cons of homeownership.

Mortgage means “Death Pledge” in Old French. 

Ever since I learned this, from a friend’s Tweet of all places, it’s all I think about. Home ownership = Death Pledge. Home to the death. Death home.

You see, my partner and I are considering buying a house. This terrifies me, owning a house. Growing up, my family moved three times before I voluntarily split for college in Wisconsin before I moved to Chicago. Even here, I move every few years, upgrading apartments to ones with more light and more space. I haven’t stayed in one place for more than a four years since I was 16! My brain struggles with the concept. It felt like freedom to not be tied to any piece of property. 

On the other hand, I’m tired of apartment life. Neighbors are loud, winters suck when you have a dog that needs to be walked three times a day. I want a garden, a vegetable patch, a big yard for the dog. I want to paint the kitchen crazy bright colors and get a decent fridge and install shelves and hooks for all my plant babies. 

But the financial burden and risk involved because I want to futz around with decor without losing a security deposit does not seem worth it. I was in my early 20s in 2008, that age where you’re meant to save money to buy a home. I remember the wrenching stories of foreclosures, friends of friends losing their homes. Money gone, a piece of them, gone. I had voluntarily left a bunch of homes over the years, but to have one taken away was unimaginable. I didn’t want to ever be in that situation.

I asked some homeowner friends my age what they thought of buying property.

“Convince me,” I said to my friend A. in a playful yet deadly serious way. “Convince me that we should buy a home.”

“You can do whatever you want,” he replied in a tone full of confidence. “I could knock out a wall,” he said. “All I need is a sledgehammer.”

The I-can-do-what-I-want attitude sounded like the reasoning of an entitled teenager, not a 40 year-old man. That must have shown on my face because then he talked about money, the most material, practical thing for adults. He and his wife had a fixed mortgage: monthly payments would stay the same over 30 years. They’d recently refinanced and will spend $350 less on their monthly payments, which will be done in 2049. 

“I’m going to die in this house,” A. announced. He sounded...satisfied. Pleased even.

That perhaps terrified me even more than the money and logistics and just the overwhelm at the process for buying the house. 2020 violently demonstrated that you can’t predict the future. And to be beholden to a piece of property for 28  more years is beyond what my puny imagination can conceive. 

Buying a home is more than just the structure, the property. It seems to me that buying a home is making a massive gamble on the future. What you’re buying into now probably won’t exist in 5, 10, 20, 30 years. I don’t mean just the house: neighborhoods change, towns change. What if obnoxious neighbors move in who like to shoot rifles in their backyard and hate dogs and have loud parties at 2 a.m.? What of floods, tornados, fires? What if another derecho tears through and blasts off your roof? In the face of climate change and catastrophic events destroying homes and displacing whole communities, the idea of owning property feels absurd. The color of the kitchen is irrelevant if the whole house will get obliterated.

Further, there’s a tremendous emphasis placed on owning a home as a path to wealth, which can feel like a bad joke since it often leaves behind communities of color and younger people and Millenials who are saddled with student loan debt and graduated into a tough job market.

I may have made it through the tough job market, but what if I lose my job and can’t afford my mortgage in the future? Outside the money involved with the purchase, what about the money to maintain the home? The time and energy involved with the constant upkeep: mowing the lawn, shoveling, cleaning gutters, replacing fridges and washers… Even the fun stuff like decorating feels like so much. A start-up I once worked with was building a product whose selling point was helping homeowners manage the upkeep of their home: routine HVAC checks, gutter cleanings, chimney cleanings, miscellaneous plumbing disasters, and random handyman needs. (Get a good handyman, another friend’s advice). 

And then there’s the Big Stuff: you need a new roof, the air goes out on a 90-degree day, your basement floods. Fixing that is expensive! It’s a hassle! It’s stressful! Why do we do this to ourselves? Of course I like the idea of a fixed mortgage vs. the constantly rising rent. That’s obviously great. But outside dropping a load of money on buying a place or dealing with the vagaries of a landlord, what are the other realistic options for stable housing? There aren’t many. And though I love the idea of buying an airstream and living from the road, I also hate long car rides.

While talking to A. and his wife, we were all sitting outside, sipping gin and tonics and indulging in snacks. She pointed out her plant experiments: blueberries, a lime tree, azaleas, turnip greens. Her husband had taken over the one-car garage with his tools and woodworking equipment and a beer fridge. He’s working on staining the chairs the same red-brown hue as the table. 

I saw how my friends could actually do what they wanted, and they had the space to do it. With the benefit of ownership comes a different kind of freedom. They could endlessly experiment and customize and mold the place to their tastes, adapt it to their hobbies and lifestyle, and make something their own, a true expression of themselves. And then they invite friends over who share in that. Yeah, that I-can-do-what-I-want argument was spot on. 

Honestly I’m just talking around my anxiety, the anxiety of parting with a large sum of money, anxiety around commitment to a piece of property, anxiety of not being able to see into the future, or even make a decent prediction. I shout into the void: Is this a even a good idea??

Of course no one can predict the future so the question is what am I going to do now. My therapist suggests reframing my thinking. The decision should not be about good vs. bad, but is the decision grounded. Do you have solid, meaingful reasons for the decision you make?

It’s a privilege to have options. How do you weigh the scales, of money and expenses and all the items you could neatly calculate in an Excel sheet against those intangibles, those things that are hard to pin down but take up a lot of space in your heart: the desire to feel like you’re home, of sitting by your garden with a glass of wine while your partner sips whiskey and your weird little dog sniffs the air and watches the shadows grow longer.  

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