Our Rocky Road To Home Ownership: Saving Up, Stressing Out, and Taking The Plunge
Finances! Feels like a scary topic to breach. While we’d rather discuss something lighter like politics or religion, we try our best to be an open book when it comes to documenting our lives and journey together, especially as that pertains to creating a comfortable, joy-filled home.
Part of making a home for us has always meant keeping things as budget-friendly as possible, which is why most of our designs, recipes, and DIY guides are geared towards being low cost. We’re fortunate that as we’ve grown personally, we’ve also grown professionally to the point that we recently were able to close on and move into our very first house. As freelance workers, that felt like a near impossibility for so, so long, even up to just a year ago! We know that plenty of people who would like to buy a home probably feel the same way, that it’s out of reach or will never happen. So with this transparency and the story of our journey to homeownership, we hope to help make the process just a little less scary for anyone in a similar position!
We’re partnering with Northwestern Mutual for this post and for the remainder of the year as we document our financial planning process for our home renovations and being new homeowners. As always, all opinions are our own. Thank you for supporting the sponsors that keep our blog alive!”
We haven’t always been good with money. In fact, I can more confidently say, we’ve always been bad with money… until about two years ago when we made some drastic shifts in our spending priorities, in an effort to free ourselves from credit card debt, save money, and quit stressing to the point of inaction.
Like we always do, we made that shift pretty dramatic. We’d just returned to our hometown of New Orleans after a several-months-long road trip that left us kinda broke (I mentioned we were bad with money right?), and we knew it was time for us to take a more serious look at planning for our future. And a huge part of that meant getting our finances in order. We made the decision to move to a small town about an hour outside the city that was much more affordable, quiet enough that we could really focus on working on our business, and also severely limited our options when it comes to spending—there wasn’t that much to do. With all of our friends now over an hour away, we became more diligent about planning our social activities, which also made us more diligent about how and when we spent money. Expenses that were once common—like grabbing a drink out on a weekday, costly coffees in cute cafes, and even dinner out—all became rare for us. New clothes, updated equipment for work, and any unnecessary subscription services were all out the window. The idea of grabbing breakfast or weekend brunch out of the house? What is this, Sex And The City? No. Didn’t happen.
I never said it was fun!
But it worked. This new more boring life combined with the continued growth of our business and workload translated into us being able to pay off credit card debt fast (which greatly improved our credit scores) and save pretty much every cent that wasn’t going to our rent, insurances, food, gyms, or car payments / gas. In two years we went from having virtually no savings, to having enough money for a down payment, emergency funds, and first round of renovations on our home.
The thing is, this plan wasn’t very calculated and could have very easily gone wrong. We were very conscious about our spending, but our earning also increased—which, sure, we can take some credit for doing good work that led to more work, but truly a lot of that was left to luck. As freelancers, our income varies from year to year, and had our work load not continued to increase, two years of saving very easily could’ve turned into four years of saving and by that point we’d probably be incredibly unhappy in our small town. Oh, Covington, Louisiana, you were good to us but you are kinda super boring.
Here’s the deal: we’re lucky everything worked out the way it did, but we really should’ve had a more well thought out road map to get us to our goal of home ownership. So, dear friend, that’s why we’re partnering with Northwestern Mutual for the remainder of the year. We wish we’d worked with a financial planner years ago to help us meet our goals with a more calculated, less dramatic approach that didn’t rely on deprivation. We want to keep the conversation going around finances and financial planning as we begin renovations on our home and adjust our mindset from saving every penny to having to make a whole lot of (responsible) expenses.
Now that we’ve learned more about how Northwestern Mutual’s financial advisors can work meet individual goals (like buying a home or planning a wedding or planning for a family), we’re kicking ourselves for not seeking their services two years ago. We honestly didn’t know a whole lot about financial planning services prior to working with Northwestern Mutual, and kind of always thought it was something that was for very wealthy people who want to invest their money. By the way in case you didn’t catch it above, we’re not very wealthy people. While they do offer advice on investments for any savings you may have, plenty of their work centers around very average needs and expenses.
Our goal in working with them over the next several months is to map out our spending as we go through the next phase of our lives, renovating our new home. Our home is a historic (read: super old) home that is very comfy up front but in need of plenty of work to bring it up to date and have it fit our style. As we move into a period where we’ll be spending a lot more money than we’ve ever had the ability to spend before, we’re going to need some advice on how to responsibly do so. And while we’re at it, we really need to develop a plan for 3 to 5 years down the line, to ensure our new financial stability is lasting and secure.
We hope this has been helpful for any of y’all that are curious about how we went about saving for our home! It’s been one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives and we’re only a month into owning it. All of the sacrifices were definitely worth it! If you’ve got any big life plans ahead, or just want to work with a professional to guide you towards financial stability, check out Northwestern Mutual and their team of experts.
Thanks for stopping by the blog!
xoxo Beau & Matt