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- Elsa and her husband bought a home in a Washington, DC, suburb this past summer for $975,000.
- She wasn't ready but thought if she waited, she'd never be able to afford a house.
- She talked about the pressure to buy and how she had to change her life to afford homeownership.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Elsa, a 27-year-old software engineer who asked that only her first name be used for privacy reasons, about her experience rushing to buy a house in Chantilly, Virginia.
Elsa and her husband always imagined owning a house and starting a family. The two originally planned to buy this summer, but after periodically searching for homes in 2022, they thought the kind of home they wanted would be outside of their price range by then.
Their mortgage payment is more than triple their previous monthly rent, and they've been forced to make changes to their lifestyle to afford their home.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
This was my first time buying a house. We'd been thinking about it for maybe three years and started saving as much as we could.
We originally planned to buy a house during the summer this year, because we thought that would be a good time frame to have enough for a high down payment.
Every once in a while we'd go on Zillow and look at the prices of houses in the area, and I noticed that year by year the prices kept increasing — and salaries are definitely not keeping up. I told my husband, "At this rate, we're never going to buy anything."
We started looking at houses in May and ended up buying that month. We made the decision a bit impulsively.
We borrowed more than we should have
We were renting a small one-bedroom apartment for $1,800. We were saving around $4,000 a month, so we thought that a $6,000 monthly mortgage payment would be doable.
We were expecting rates in the 4% or maybe higher 3% range, but in the end we ended up with a 5% interest rate.
Our take-home pay each month is a bit more than $11,000, and our monthly mortgage payment is about $6,800. But we've been trying to pay a little bit more in order to save on interest.
I've heard people say to borrow less than what the bank will allow you to. I think we should have done that, but instead, we almost maxed out on our loan.
We should have gone smaller
It's a single-family home with four bedrooms and 2½ bathrooms.
We know that the house is too big for two adults, two cats, and a dog. We do plan to have children, and we wanted to make sure that we have a big enough house for that and that we were in a decent school district. We didn't want to risk getting a house and then having to move in a few years.
We should have established a clearer budget so we could figure out what we could actually afford, instead of relying on how much the bank would let us borrow.
I think we should have gone for a smaller, cheaper house.
We've struggled to afford the costs outside of the monthly payment
Now that we're in the house making those monthly payments, we've been piling on credit-card debt for the past few months. We've realized we're going to have to make some substantial lifestyle changes to be able to afford the house.
We definitely didn't anticipate having as many repair expenses. The house we bought is older, so we have been overwhelmed with repairs like multiple water leaks.
We've spent around $6,000 on repairs, and that's with having a home warranty, so it could have been a lot worse.
Over the past few years, I've seen home prices going up, and I don't see why they would go down anytime soon. Maybe we needed to buy something and then suffer a bit for the first few years. Hopefully our salaries will increase and we'll be able to get by more comfortably.