“Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.”

Henry David Thoreau – Walden

The house was gorgeous. White trim, grey, red front door, with huge expansive windows, 10 foot ceilings, an impressive foyer that went up two stories dominated by a heavy-looking chandelier. Two bathrooms with double sinks, a master bathroom that was almost as big as the bedroom in my current house. Oh, and there was a balcony exclusively for the master bedroom… room enough for two chairs and a nice small table to enjoy coffee in the morning or a beer in the evening.

Below is an actual picture of my big house, nestled in the woods on 5 acres (drone shot)

And then let’s talk about where it was. On almost 5 acres of land, in an exclusive neighborhood with only 18 houses. Out back, the house had a huge, multi-level deck, a hot tub, two patios. Further away, towards the edge of the woods, was a circular patio that ensconced a fire-pit surrounded by Adirondack chairs.

It gets better…behind the fire-pit was a path that went down through the woods to a trail that used to be a historic railroad that went from Baltimore, MD up to Harrisburg, PA. It was one of the first “rails to trails” conversions, now occupied by runners, bikers and the occasional horse-rider.

I can’t help but mention, all along this former rail line trail was a river, renowned in this country for trout fishing. One could be running along that trail watching fly fishermen gracefully whirling their lines in the air before setting them on the water.

In short, this sounded like a dream house.

This house was the topic of discussion five years ago with my extended family over Thanksgiving.

Flash back over 5 years ago…We were having Thanksgiving at my house. It was a nice split-level, with 3 bedrooms, 2 full and 1 half bathroom, a single car garage, a decent patch of backyard with a picket fence. Each house was right next to the next to the other.

It was your standard, suburban house for Maryland. I liked it. Could have been bigger. Could have been in a bit more of a rural location. Could have been on a bigger piece of land. But I liked it.

My wife had been looking for the next house to move into for several years. We had been in the current house for a bit over 15 years. We had 3 boys and the house felt a bit cramped. Two of them had to share a bedroom.

She sometimes found a house that looked amazing and we would go look at it. But while they were nice, they were always outside of our budget.

However, on this particular Thanksgiving, the topic turned to this particular house. My wife had spotted it and had been looking at it for a week or so online.

Soon, everyone got involved in the discussion. We pulled up the house listing online. I hadn’t seen it and didn’t even know that my wife had spotted this house until just then.

It did look amazing.

Then the topic invariably turned towards affordability. Like the others, it was a stretch and likely outside of our budget. Did we have enough money for a down-payment? Could we afford the monthly mortgage?

The subject soon died down and we went on to other topics.

The next day…at work…I started thinking about the house again. I looked it up online. It really was amazing.

Then all of a sudden it hit me.

I wanted that house.

No.

I had to have that house.

Next thing you know, two days later we looked at the house, made an offer, it was accepted and under contract.

I had the house.

What it was like owning my big “dream house”

So we moved into that big, beautiful dream house. It had everything we wanted. It was going to be the last house we owned.

I’m a handy guy, I can pretty much take a house that has been fully gutted down to the studs and build it all back up…by myself. Plumbing, electrical, drywall, tiling, kitchen cabinets, you name it….I’ve done it all.

So I got started on making some improvements…making it just the way we wanted.

A sampling of improvement projects included:

• Redoing the entire basement room, which had been a cold, cement floor, dimly lit and unwelcoming, into a gorgeous, warm, brightly lit room that became a favorite place for my kids to play their video games.
• Shoring up the expansive deck underneath, also replacing old deck boards and re-painting with proper deck paint.
• Installation of recessed lights
• Painting
• Installation of electric baseboard heat in a sunroom area

But as the years went on in this house, I noticed that I wanted to do other things instead of just moving from one project to the next. I was devoting my entire weekends to a project, breaking my back. I didn’t want to live like that anymore.

Yep, I was tired. Tired of moving from one project to the next. Sure, it is rewarding to work with your hands and then look back and physically see and enjoy what you created, but it didn’t provide the same level of satisfaction that it once did.

The big house required a lot of maintenance

On that Thanksgiving Day, my brother-in-law did mention a few drawbacks. What about maintaining all of that house? What about maintaining the land, the landscaping?

I brushed that aside, thinking it was a rather new house (built in 1989), compared to my current house (built in 1957) and thought that it wasn’t going to be a big deal.

Boy, was I wrong.

• One of the two heat pumps needed to be replaced
• The heating unit for the upstairs level also died…that needed to be replaced
• The deck underneath needed to be shored up because drainage around the house had essentially created a riverbed that gouged out the earth around the support beams
• Mulch. We needed lots of mulch because of all the plant beds. At our prior house, we could mulch with maybe 15 bags at $2 each from Home Depot. Here, we needed a full freaking dump truck load for $600. Also, that mulch needs to be spread across the plant beds, right?
• Mowing. About 1 acre out of the 5 was grass that needed to be mowed. That required first fixing up the riding mower that the owners left us in the shed. Had to plunk some money into that to get it working and of course….then you had to actually mow every weekend.
• One of the stone patios – Part of it was shifting, sliding downward and to the side. It needed to be removed, shored back up and rebuilt.
• The hot tub – It decided to stop being hot.
• The garage door – It decided to stop opening.

Some of this maintenance and fixing I could do by myself. Some of it required hiring someone to do it.

All of it required money. Lots of money.

The big house cost too much

There were three areas my wife and I calculated when we were deciding to buy the big house:

• The down payment to buy it
• The ongoing monthly mortgage and taxes
• The ongoing maintenance

Here is how that went…

The down payment

Did I tell you that we had hardly any cash savings? Sure, we had plenty in our retirement accounts, but no cash savings to really speak of.

This house required about $70,000 as a down payment. We wanted to make an offer that wasn’t contingent on selling our current home because it was a competitive market, so we needed cash.

Where did we go for cash?

Our 401k’s.

We took out loans from our 401k’s. Just typing that makes me cringe. Sure, it isn’t taxable. Sure, the “interest” is actually being paid back to ourselves, so that 4.5% part of the loan goes back to us.

After we sold the other house, we paid off one of the two 401k loans and had split the mortgage on the new house into two loans…so we paid off that second mortgage.

Pretty smart maneuvering to make it happen, but we made it happen.

But really, our having to do all of that should be have been telling us that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. We should not be doing such creative financial maneuvering if the house was a match with our finances.

The ongoing monthly cost (mortgage and taxes)

Owning this house was a bit of a stretch from a budget perspective. However, on paper, it was doable. It was an additional $12,000 a year, with enough to continue to save for retirement, the kids college, vacations, food, etc…

I had recently started in a new role about one year earlier and was making more money, so that helped.

After being in the house for a few years, we found though that we were barely able to cover our costs. What looked doable on paper turn out to be not so much in reality.

Life and life events get in the way. No matter how carefully you plan a budget, one has to take into account the uncertainty that life throws your way. Things that you hadn’t considered…those things cost money.

What we found is that the line of credit at the bank kept going up. We would knock it down a bit each year, but overall, it kept growing. Along with our credit card bill.

Bottom line, the monthly cost to own this house wasn’t matching our budget.

The ongoing maintenance on the house

There was the maintenance list that I painfully described, the improvements…was just not what we expected.

What my brother-in-law pointed out about the monthly costs that I had earlier brushed off…turned out to be true.

These costs were high. Higher than what I thought. Higher than what our budget could bear.

We were running about $500 short every month.

What I learned

Looking back now with some perspective, I can see the mistakes I made and what I learned for use in the future.

• I let my ego buy the house – Even though I denied it to myself at the time, deep down, there was the thought how nice it would be to own a big impressive house. My friends would be impressed. My family. “Look at me. I made it.”
• I thought it would “fix” my marriage – I will go into this in a bit more detail in the future, but bottom line, my relationship with my wife needed some work and honestly, needed to be re-evaluated. I thought that maybe by having this nice house… it would bring us closer. Doesn’t having coffee together on our master bedroom balcony sound romantic?
• I wanted to live a simpler life. I had changed. I didn’t want to do projects all of the time around the house. I wanted to be outside more with family and friends. Things like being outside – going for long runs on the trail I mentioned. That smaller house we had owned before looked ever more appealing to me. I realized (after over 40 years) that happiness is not about material things, it is about living in the present, doing what you love with others….helping others, having a purpose in life.
• Debt. I had started to become very uncomfortable with our ever-increasing level of debt. No matter how much more money I made, I just felt like it was never enough…my spending kept increasing just a bit more than my income.
• I liked the “idea” of owning big house more than actually owning it. By that I mean, I had imagined how great it would be to own this house. How idyllic it would be. But the reality turned out to be quite different. When you feel the stress of debt, the stress of meeting monthly payments, the stress of a strained marriage, no matter how amazing your house might look, I wasn’t living the life I wanted.

What happened?

I will go into this in future posts, and you can read a bit about it now in my “About me” page, but bottom line… my wife and moved our separate ways and I no longer own the house.

I don’t look at all of this as a negative though. The big house has showed me what I want out of life. It has given me a determination to turn my finances around. It has showed me what I want in a future relationship.

For that, I am grateful.

I’m curious – Have you had a similar experience?

Glenn