8.
“When my husband and I bought our first home in our late twenties, we purposely chose a place that was way below what we could afford with our dual income; that was a really fun conversation with our mortgage lender, who kept trying to push us toward more and more expensive properties just to line their own pockets with more cash. For a while, it was amazing, and we had so much money left to save and invest and use for fun things, like trips and gifts and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Then, my husband got sick, and he’s been on disability for a while now. He’ll be OK, but on my income alone, we couldn’t afford our already low mortgage. We had to sell ASAP. At the time, the market in our area was non-existent, and we struggled to find an actual interested buyer for over a year. We were getting so close to foreclosure, too, before we finally found the buyer who bought our place — and we went back to renting a smaller place month-to-month.”
“Moral of the story: You never know what will happen. Your home might not feel like a huge commitment when everything is going right, but as soon as something goes wrong, it can be a money trap that’s nearly impossible to get out of. Had we purchased a home at the cost our lender said we could ‘comfortably afford,’ we would’ve literally gone bankrupt. My advice is to be extraordinarily conservative.”
—Anonymous
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