Off the top of your head, can you name some of the “conventional wisdom” about owning a home?
- It’s an investment.
- It will grow in value.
- Everyone wants to live in a house.
- If you’re renting, you’re just throwing your money away.
- Owning a home gives you a sense of satisfaction.

Pretty much whatever you can name, I bought into. I was further encouraged by my parents, who couldn’t go a week without asking us if we were going to buy a house. Obviously, we’d followed the life script by getting married; now we needed a house!


Before we bought The Castle In the Woods, my husband and I were living in a three-bedroom apartment in Watertown, MA. It was a Victorian two-family home, and we lived above the elderly parents of our landlord. The entire place was covered in gorgeous hardwood–on the floors and on the walls. The second bedroom was used as a craft room/guest bedroom; the third “bedroom”–which was only a bedroom if you were feeling very generous–was used as a computer room/office. The total price tag per month was $1,600+utilities, which, if you live in the Boston suburbs, you know is pretty goddamn modest. A similarly-sized townhouse in a community would have cost us around $2,000/month.

There were a couple of problems with this place. First of all, it was kind of inconvenient to be in the middle of sculpting plate armor out of clay (costuming being one of our hobbies) and have one’s parents visit. This became even more inconvenient when the ancient sofa bed in the guest/sewing room died a horrible death from metal fatigue, and the remaining parts–including the mattress, flat on the floor–took up most of the room. Secondly, the place had great natural light!… which meant that there were no walls on which to put bookshelves, and that it was hotter than the gates of hell in summer. Half of our books were in storage in the attic, which was a terrifying place to visit. The basement was also a terrifying place to visit, with a washer that only sorta worked and an inch of coal dust on the floor (we once found a note tacked on a beam that listed coal deliveries in 1940). It also flooded every spring, despite the fact that we lived on a hill. Go figure.

There were some big upsides to living in this apartment, though, the largest of which was that we were conveniently located–close to work, close to businesses, close to friends. Oh, and it was well within our income range–especially when I started working in Westford.

It was the job in Westford, in fact, that led us to buy a house, as my income nearly doubled. Now we live in a humungo house in Lunenburg, 50 miles outside of Boston. We have the sunroom for gaming, and the finished basement for crafting, and a guest room and a computer room besides. We have three acres of land. We have central air and central vac. We also, however, have two mortgages, a $2700/month mortgage bill, and more maintenance than I want to deal with. We have a long driveway to plow of snow, and a large field to mow (we simply didn’t this year), and leaves to rake, and gutters to clean, and a chimney to clean, and a well to test for arsenic, and private sewer to dear god I hope it doesn’t blow up. We are also DAMN far away from all of our friends.

Matt will dislike me saying this, but I sometimes think it was a costly mistake, and I worry that it’s going to keep me chained to my job (or a job) for a long time.

I used the term “rich” in my post title, but what does that mean to me? My interests are varied and fluid; I’m not convinced that there’s one job I want to do for the rest of my life, and I certainly want to be able to know I can “walk away” whenever I want. The term “independently wealthy” is what I’m aiming for–focus on the independent.

I have no idea how I will accomplish this while owning this house.

As it is now, I feel like we do what we can to get ahead financially. We are quite frugal and our needs are simple in most ways. We play games like “how long can we go without turning the heat on?” or “how long can we go without buying groceries?” or “how long can we go without buying a microwave to replace the one that died?” But still I feel that there’s this looming specter; this ginormous house that I really don’t want to maintain. That has, in fact, lost value since we bought it (at the beginning of the Boston-area bubble crack, when prices had begun to drop but were not all that low)–we payed $375K and the house is now valued at around $363K.

With the house, came big purchases–the pine flooring on the top floor, because one of our cats would have otherwise ruined the carpet. Two more cats (there is an exponential relationship between number of cats and amount of trouble, I’ve discovered… though I do love my bebbies). Oil burner repairs; AC repairs; a new fan; a grill (partially subsidized by Matt’s parents, admittedly).

Oh, AND I’m taking classes now, which is another ~$3,000 a year. Why? So I can get a better job. To pay for the house. That I can NEVER ENJOY because I’m working half the time, or so exhausted from working that I do nothing but sit on my ass and play MMOs. (On the plus side, my student loans were automatically deferred?)

And now, my car is dying, necessitating many expensive repairs along the way. We had just begun to build an emergency fund when we had to pull most of it to pay for these repairs. We are beginning to consider our options. Despite a fantasy that I should replace my car with a Vespa, we will probably have to buy another car. Which we can’t buy with cash. Because we have no savings. Because we are paying $500 extra a month on this goddamn house so that we pay it off in our lifetimes.

It’s a lovely house, granted–very comfortable, and it really does feel like *home* now. We’re in no danger of going into foreclosure, and we manage to simultaneously pay $500 extra on the mortgage each month, put away for our retirement, and put (a little) money into savings on our current income.

But I can’t shake the feeling that this house is keeping me from doing what I really want to do. That, inevitably, leads to me to think what I could have done to make the Watertown place more workable. I could have purged a lot of my books; I have no doubts I could have reduced it to the bookcases we could keep out. We could have bought a new sofa bed for the guest room–it’s a helluva lot cheaper than a house–and finally admitted that we haven’t done enough crafting in the past two years to warrant a full-time craft room. If my car died, I could have biked to work, or taken public transport, at least while I worked at Brandeis. We could have spent more time there, building a proper down payment, to finally live in an area we wanted to live in.

So yeah… to go over the points listed above:

“Owning a home is an investment.” Uh… no. Owning a house you live in yourself? Not an investment. It’s money going out of your pocket every month, and over the course of a 30-year mortgage this house will cost us $700K. That actually sounds like the OPPOSITE of an investment, to me.
“It will grow in value.” Homes don’t appreciate. LAND appreciates. SPACE appreciates. Your aluminum siding does not appreciate, AND you have to wash it. Plus, as the recent housing market bust has shown, land does not always grow in value.
“Everyone wants to live in a house.” Well, no, not everyone wants to. Voluntary simplicity acquainted me with this concept. Owning a home is emblematic in this country, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessary. And there’s an awful lot not to like about owning a home.
“If you’re renting, you’re just throwing your money away.” If you’re living in a house that isn’t what you need, and is going to cost you twice as much over the life of the loan, you’re throwing your money away, too. You just have something to show at the end.
“Owning a home gives you a sense of satisfaction.” I think this post belies this.

What would you do in my situation?

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