Tag Archives: house

Mental Illness

36 Weeks Pregnant and Maybe a Less Depressing Post

Leave a comment

Sorry for all the depressing posts lately. I just feel super overwhelmed. I’m looking forward to meeting my new baby. Lots of things are going well in my life. I just wish I could find a way to be happy with what I have. I know I have SO MUCH but nothing feels right, if that makes any sense. I don’t feel settled. This house isn’t helping. It certainly doesn’t feel like home. I probably could make it feel like home with enough purchases and remodeling, but the costs to do that are so high I feel like, why bother until I have, like $5M saved up. Then… maybe I can splurge a bit. Beyond the $75k splurge of remodeling one bathroom and putting in AC and a new electric panel and functional garage door.

Most of all, I just want to figure out the storage situation in this house. Christmas was lovely yesterday, but now my son’s new toys (complete with about 100 new parts) are all over our family room floor. Because we moved from a 1 bedroom apartment we just don’t have that much furniture. I know I can buy IKEA or used stuff, but I want to have “nice things” in my home to make it feel more like a home. Not designer pieces or anything… but sturdy, nicely made cabinets and such. I don’t want to buy crap because I know we’ll keep it forever as we did with our prior broken pieces.

So I’m trying to strategize on what to buy when, but it’s just overwhelming. We do need a kitchen table, so that’s probably first. But there’s also just so much space in this house that is wasted and I want to use it for storage. The hallway, for example, is extra wide, while the bedrooms are small. It seems ripe for putting in some good storage. But then, it will cost a lot…

And I’m really feeling like this isn’t our forever home. Maybe I’ll change my mind on that in a few years, but it’s just boxy and has no character. It works. It’s fine. Our bedroom is in the living room and after spending $1.7M on a house I still feel like I’m living like someone who just graduated from college. I guess that is probably what is bothering me the most. I bought this place because it has potential… but who can afford to make potential what it can be in the Bay Area? Maybe I should have spent more. Or at least bought in the city where I feel at home. Why did I buy here? Well, I was running from things as per usual. It was a bit more affordable as well, but really… I just wanted to move far from my job so I have NO EXCUSES when it comes to looking for something new in a year. I needed. change. Since I was 17 I’ve moved every 4 years or so. Or less. I felt restless. I was going crazy. New city. New everything. Except we happened to move close to some old friends which happened by accident as I’m super confused about the geography of where we live. That’s how little I know about this area.

But then I realized I’m sad I left the place where I want to be. I mean, it’s only a 40 minute drive away. And long term this area may be better for my career. Even though I’m far from certain jobs, there are a number of companies within a 15 minute drive. If I can score a position at one of them then I’ll be able to come home from work and see my kids more often (once I’m back at an office.) That’s really important to me. And the area does seem family friendly. If I can make friends with other families with young kids then that will help too. Right now it’s just impossible with the pandemic. And it’s always impossible with my awkwardness and social anxiety (people who say you just meet people through your kids don’t understand what it’s like to have crippling social anxiety) but at some point maybe I can make some friends and have some kind of a life again. Maybe I’ll end up liking it here.

Or maybe I won’t. I need to focus — eye on the prize. $3M then more.  Get to the point where I can buy furniture for my house and paint the walls a color I like and put in new flooring and revamp the landscaping so it feels like my home, not someone else’s that I’m living in temporarily. Or move. Probably move. It is stupid we didn’t just rent but — it’s ALSO good to have this home as a test run. We’re learning a lot about home ownership and what we want to buy. Unfortunately it took buying a home to do this, but we’re ready to be smart homebuyers now! Hopefully if we sell we won’t lose too much. I’m expecting to lose about $100k on this house if we sell in 3 years, which is pretty crappy but it is the price of figuring out what we want and what matters most. If I can keep earning and growing my net worth it will be ok. Sucky, but ok. And I think it will actually be fun to shop for a HOME when the pandemic is over and our oldest son is old enough to come with us and help us pick out a place. Who knows what the market will be like then, but if it’s up then my house will be worth more to sell and if it’s down then houses where I want to buy will be more affordable, maybe.

I also had a pretty major realization yesterday morning in my half-waking moments about my career path. I figured out something I could do and actually even be VP of where I probably could thrive. I was thinking about all the things I’ve done in the past few years that were successful and a light bulb went off. I really need a job where I can have a team and where I run strategy and don’t get in the weeds on the projects. The opposite of my job now! But, the good news is that my new role, while super in the weeds, is really forcing me to learn how to project manage and time manage in a way I haven’t before. My boss is REALLY good at this stuff, and I’m learning a lot from him. So I’m feeling pretty confident about landing a role that is a much better fit in a year when I start looking. This year will still be rough (and I have to get my shit together and be ON TOP of things) but I think I can do it. I need to completely ignore the stock vesting because it gives me so much anxiety to think about this lotto ticket I’m holding on to for dear life (I mean, when else in my life will I be looking at a year where it’s possible I will make $1M — or anything close to that?) Can you blame me for feeling anxious and distracted? I guess that would motivate some people. For me all I can think about is how if I fuck up I’m throwing away SO MUCH MONEY and all I have to do is NOT BE A TOTAL FUCK UP right now.

Easier said than done looking ahead at a year with a toddler and a newborn. But I’ve got a path to making it work. A year ago, being put on a PIP by my boss and basically being slowly pushed out the door, I fought for my right to stay. With nothing to lose (because I figured I was getting fired anyway) I suddenly could focus on my work. I just need that energy again. And to ignore the potential earning. It helps to think about how many people I work with are likely earning a lot more than I am (which is crazy) due to being in more senior roles or negotiating better or just joining even earlier. It is just insane. Especially in the world we live in right now where so many people are struggling and then there’s our little tech bubble where stock prices are going up and up and up. It’s bizarre. I am both grateful and terrified, and horrified.

Anyway, I’m enjoying watching the sunrise out of my window. This doesn’t feel like home but it’s still a nice place to be for now. Maybe it will grow on me. Or maybe I will grow on me and figure out a way to earn more and have a stable career so we can move back where I really want to be. I just need to figure out how to chill out and be happy with what we have for now. And enjoy the next weeks of being a mom of one and the many ahead of being a mom of two. Because life is happening whether I like it or not. And I’m tired of wasting it feeling like a complete failure and mental basket case. I’m at least not manic right now. The more that I think about it the more I realize that I am super bipolar and that makes me sad too. Because I need to deal with that at some point. Or at least figure out how to not let my moods change my personality and make me do stupid things. I mean, thank G-d I didn’t do anything too stupid, but it could have easily gone past embarrassing myself in a number of cases to total self destruction. I am still sitting here thinking WTF happened in 2019 and who was I?  And how do I avoid that happening again in the future? I know it wasn’t a one time thing. I’ve had phases of life where I’ve been more manic. Like this engine was running. Like I was just alive and connecting with others and it felt good at the time. But then… that’s fantasy world. That’s insanity. I’m glad I’m not there now. I want to erase all of it. But I also realize that whatever this is – this depression–is just as “not real” and one day I’ll come out of it, I guess. I’ll look back and wonder why I was so sad and hopeless.

It’s safer here though. The depression is a much safer place to be. I know who I am here. I maybe am hyper sensitive and irritable but I at least feel like I’m grounded in logic. Whereas mania is different. It’s… it’s taking the things I feel and think that I know are absolutely ridiculous and making them seem possible. Sometimes that is good, I guess. One can be extremely creative and productive in those periods. But then it feels like anything that isn’t attached to that heightened existence is numbing. It’s a drug and you need more of it. Like you’re always on the verge of some incredible release that can only be achieved by ripping yourself apart or being a character in a story that isn’t meant for real life. And then, I guess, at some point, you snap out of it. You come back to earth. You think — oh my god — what did I say? Who was I then? How can I look my friends and family in the eye again, if they happened to be involved in any of this craziness? You fall into this deep depression out of being embarrassed and ashamed. You wonder if/when you’ll be that person again. You try to explain this to your therapist but she doesn’t understand exactly. Or you don’t really tell her because you are that ashamed of it. You don’t really want the diagnosis. Depression is ok. It’s kind of quaint. It’s ok to hate yourself too much. But is it ok to love yourself too much? Not that loving oneself is really what mania is… it’s also a form of self hatred. But in my case, it’s just wanting to be loved with such intensity, to find some kind of outer worldly connection to something. The opposite of numb. The opposite of aging and adulting and absoluting. I see why it’s so compelling. And I am so scared of falling back into it.

So for now, I am better off in this sad space. It’s safe. It’s not crazy. I still can find little moments of happiness here. I hope this is where I stay through the next year at least. So I can push through this last year of vesting and reevaluate everything when I’m close to $3M net worth. It is one year. I need to hold my breath, not do anything else stupid, and get through it. I’m going to do it.

Oh, and I bought a Roomba.

Adulting, Career, Mental Illness, Real Estate & Rent

Moving Week. So Long Apartment. Hello House of Holes. (This isn’t a post about porn.)

Leave a comment

Sorry to disappoint, but House of Holes is not the title of the new porno I’m staring in–it’s what the house I’m moving into looks like at the moment.

Despite our hopes to have all construction work done before moving in and before having a baby, in actuality we’re moving into a house with a circuit busted, holes just about everywhere (my favorite is the giant dark gaping hole… into the crawl space of doom where the furnace used to be) and my electric panel to replace the one that apparently self combusts without notice is going to make it in sometime around the second week of January, despite contracting for it back in mid November. Oh, and my bathroom is, well, it looks like the early stages of a home remodeling show at the second. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t take 30 minutes to transform from drab to fab.

My biggest concern about all the work still needing to be done is not the holes or lack of lighting. It’s that now we have to live in a house with people coming in and out in the height of the pandemic. We are setting it up so our bed will be in the living room on one end of the house away from most of the construction and hoping between that and going out on the days people are doing work, we can avoid getting sick.

Speaking of getting sick, my husband’s grandmother, age 96, caught COVID at her nursing home this week. The window visit to see her yesterday was scary and surreal. So far she’s doing “ok” in the sense that she was moved to a larger nursing home and is sitting up and communicating, but she got a positive diagnosis just 4 days ago (her entire group home got sick – ugh!) so at this point, who knows. I thought the window visit would be regulated somehow… I mean, it was probably fine, but after nearly a year of being so careful to avoid humans who might have COVID, it felt strange to walk a path around the nursing home past windows (hopefully all closed) with my husband and son (wearing our masks of course) to a window in the back that they opened for the visit. She sat 6 feet away, supposedly. She seemed happy to see us and my son. We haven’t seen her in nearly a year. The group home where she was went into complete lock down in March, or so we were told. I can’t even imagine what the last months were like for her. We’re not close or anything (she doesn’t talk much and is quite introverted) but still… what a sad life–already a sad life being a widow in your 90s stuck in a small house waiting to die. And then corona comes along and you can’t even see your family. Horrible.

She is 96 which is pretty incredible and I’ve read people over 95 tend to actually fare better with COVID because they have really good genes, so we’re hopeful. We, of course, don’t want to lose great grandma, and certainly not to COVID, but on top of all this–when my husband’s grandmother does pass away, it will set off a domino effect of logistical nightmare for my husband and his mother, as his mother lives in her mother’s house which is filled with half a century or more of thrift store hoarder heaven. Undoubtedly the brother who is managing his mother’s care will be quick to want to sell the house, which means it will need to be emptied and we will need to find a place for my husband’s mother to live. That alone will be a huge stress and mess whenever it happens. If it happens to happen the week my second child is born (which would be perfectly on schedule for my curse, by the way–my grandma died 4 days after my wedding, dad died 7 days after my first son was. born) then, well, it’s going to be what it is but I know my husband, faced with the reality of this situation happening now is having a heart attack every few minutes at the moment, besides being devastated that his grandma caught COVID just weeks before a vaccine availability for people her age.

I was not feeling optimistic about her situation until seeing her yesterday, and now feel a bit more hopeful. We talked to a guy who works at the nursing home (he was wearing a mask and we were outside but he got close to us to take our temperature which I found kind of crazy as if WE had COVID we weren’t going to give it to anyone during a visit where we stood outside, and HE was clearly around COVID patients all day and got, you know, within 3 feet of us to take our forehead temps. I held my breath when he took it but of course my 2 year old son did not know how to do that (he was wearing a mask, but I’m not sure how effective masks are when you’re that close.) So I’m feeling more optimistic about my husband’s grandmother recovering from Coronavirus and less optimistic of me not having Coronavirus when I go into labor. Even if I didn’t go to visit her, my husband was going, and he wanted to take our son, and it was outside (and his grandmother was sitting inside 6 feet away and we were all wearing masks), but I just feel uneasy about that whole situation. California is going to shit when it comes to our Coronavirus numbers, but in this case we chose to go near a facility with known patients. In my 35th week of pregnancy. With a husband who has high blood pressure. And a 2 year old who would probably be fine if he caught Corona unless he had a horrible reaction to it, but who knows what it does to kids over the long term?

So that just adds another layer to everything right now, everything which has so many layers I’m just letting them build up at this point and not attempting to peal them. I can’t. It’s too much. Even my upcoming performance review (which was now moved to January since I’ve opted to work a bit longer after finding out how much money I’ll be losing if I take off the extra 2-3 weeks before my delivery date) is barely registering with me, despite the occasional mental loop about how my boss and my former boss with (possibly) cautiously tell me about my demotion and how I’ll never be a leader and carefully document all of my mistakes last year so they can throw me out as soon as I get back to work after maternity leave and pass whatever HR qualified period is required to not fire a woman who just had a baby. Of course, I’ll do what it takes to be GREAT for as long as I can when I get back (which is difficult when you just had a baby and do not sleep–my first PIP came a week after I got back from maternity leave and I was losing my mind, so who knows what will happen this time.) I don’t know. I have a lot of money on the line right now. And I feel like my new role is actually good for me in that I can get the work done to an acceptable level. Maybe that’s what my former boss is thinking too. She is actually a nice person and seems to like me enough and she knows how much $ I have on the line and if she wanted to she could have fired me last year (I gave her quite the runway between the PIP and announcing that I’m pregnant so she didn’t have to feel like she was stuck with me) and she decided to keep me, or decided to not make it a priority to get rid of me at the time. Because I did do some good work. She even said so. I was doing really well the first half of the year. Then I had 3 bad months. Then I was demoted and told I’ll never be a leader.

Anyway, maybe it’s true. Or maybe I’m just going through a lot in my personal life right now and it’s not the time to lead. I just wish I could have a job where I didn’t have to constantly worry about getting fired. Layoffs happen and can’t be avoided, but I don’t want my performance to ever be part of the equation. I look at my friend who is just so confident and always gets his work done, despite his work not being too complex yet, and how that led to his promotion into my former role. Now, said friend is seemingly really good at strategy for this specific position, and he deserves to move up in his career and have a shot at running the show. Still, I’m unclear how the work I’ve done (and what I’ve put out) is so horrible over what he might do. People just have a negative perception of me because I’m a bad project manager, but all of my contributions have been solid as far as I know. I just missed a few deadlines (which for the most part didn’t even push out project launches, just internal deadlines that were set too aggressively in the first place.)

Where I really failed was in not focusing on a strategy that tied to my boss’s plans close enough. But even that was pretty difficult to do as those plans changed and there was no strategic guidance. So I came up with a plan based on whatever it was I picked up on working remote from the various teams and people seemed happy with it at the time. I tried to execute on that plan and I did execute on it, but not in the way I should have. I should have made things simple, delegated work to lots of people, and lead in making other people do things so things got done and everyone was aligned and excited and motivated and everyone was like, damn gurrrrlll, you are the best leader ever. Instead I came up with a plan (collaboratively, mind you) and then tried to get the work done by reaching out to people across the organization vs mostly on my team. Stuff was pretty complicated and I wanted to make sure I put out things that were accurate so it took me too long. I set unrealistic deadlines, but for me deadlines are always unrealistic because I have a mental flaw where I can’t actually focus on work until the last minute, and then somehow the brain block opens and suddenly I am doing work that would take someone 2 weeks in one night. And no one knows the difference. Except when I’m so anxious about the situation that I can’t even get that one night. Or a bunch of people review the work and change their minds after they told me one thing, so I have to change it again. And I don’t know how to say “this is done” because I want to make everyone happy.

Anyway, wasn’t this a house about those dark holes in my house? The point was, I’m just not super focused on my job situation right now in that I have little time to dwell on it outside of hoping that whatever this review is, I’m given some sort of opportunity to take the rest of the next year to do my new job and am not given an actual demotion yet. Even if my title drops to the next tier, if I can keep the same pay and vesting schedule I would lose out only on a percentage of my bonus next year. Which would be sad but not the end of the world. I don’t know if they can take back any stock grants at this point, even with a demotion, so hopefully I can hold on to that.

Maybe after I’ve moved to my new house, set up an actual office (vs working for the past year FROM MY BED in my ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT) and have gotten past the first few sleepless months of having a baby, I can actually do a decent job. Decent meaning I unlock the mystery of making plans for a project that everyone is aligned with, from starting ideation to launch and beyond, and every single project I manage is so perfectly executed that no one can say a  negative word about me. There is absolutely nothing I can do to move up in this organization again, but that is not my goal. I have 15 months of survival, and then I can evaluate where I’m at. In 15 months, I hope to have this job, a healthy baby (in addition to my healthy toddler), a healthy husband, a vaccinated family, a house that hasn’t burnt down (and hopefully is free of holes outside of the purposeful ones in the plumbing and entryways), and then I can stop and figure out the rest of life. Do we stay a few more years? Do we move? Do I get a new job? Do I keep this one if I’m actually good at it (despite no room for advancement?) I can figure that all out then. Right now, this is a month-by-month, week-by-week, day-by-day survival game.

The current level involves figuring out how to hire a GOOD handyman to fill in the 3×3 hole into the vortex of doom in my closet (not to mention a matching portal into the attic), and how to fix the electric circuit that my bathroom remodelers say they didn’t break (they probably did but they claim the HVAC people did this, despite us knowing it was working the night of the HVAC work being complete), and all the other things that will undoubtedly go wrong once we move in. I’m trying to just embrace this all as the sitcom of my life, because when you just accept that you’re living in a comedy, even the most tragic can be spun up with hilarity to get you through it. I’ve found no amount of money can protect you from the chaos that is life. Or maybe, with some ridiculous amount you can cushion yourself from it a bit (at some point you can have an electrician living with you in your contractor’s quarters) but generally speaking, life is shit for everyone. It’s good it is, I guess. It’s more shit for some people but everyone suffers at some point, $100M in the bank or not. So I embrace my varying levels of suffering, from my first world problems of a hole-ly house to those that are a bit more substantially shitty, such as when my father died a week after my son was born in a rehab facility that I’m still convinced was negligent/not where he should have been in his condition.

Right now, I don’t know how many more bad things I can take. Birth is scary as fuck and so many things can go wrong. We don’t hear about them because we’re told as long as mom and baby are healthy/alive, then things went well. That’s not really true. Lots of things can go wrong and mom/baby survive. My first birth was not horrific compared to ones I’ve read about since having my son (you know, compared to woman who had emergency C sections where the numbing meds didn’t work AND THEY FELT EVERYTHING) or those who hemorrhaged and blacked out after giving birth and aren’t sure how they’re alive) so I’m a bit terrified of what could happen… but for the most part births are pretty standard and women have their babies come out one way or another and either way is fairly safe and babies don’t typically come out not breathing and have to go to the NICU like my son and even if they do they eventually adapt to the world and thrive like my son is doing now.

But it’s hard not to worry, especially 5 weeks (or much less) until I do this all over again. I’m both oddly looking forward to it (a redemption birth, a glorious smooth birth where baby comes out and is placed on my chest and crawls to my breast and latches with no problem and we just have that beautiful, peaceful moment I hear so much about) and terrified out of my mind about all the things that could go wrong. And then just thinking through the logistics of how to make sure my son is safe while we go to the hospital… we have somewhat of a plan but it isn’t perfect. If I’m induced, it would be a bit more controlled (pick up my MIL, bring her to our house, set her and my son up for a few days of safe living) but if I go into spontaneous labor (which is the hope) then it will look more like driving 30 minutes to the hospital while I’m screaming in pain, dropping me off, either picking her up after and driving her back to my house (another 45 minutes) then driving back to the hospital and parking (another 45 minutes) until my husband gets back to be with me (leaving me alone for a good 2 hours+ while in active labor) or he drops my son off at her house which is fine for a day but not safe for an overnight, which is going to happen if it seems like I’m about to pop (I think that’s more realistic… we book it up to her house, drop my son off and continue on to the hospital together. It would be about 45 minutes from home to the hospital at that point, with the stop.) Then once I’m in recovery and given the all clear, my husband can head out and drive my son and his mother to our house, and then at some point come back to be with me and baby at the hospital. Or if I’m doing exceptionally well he can stay home with my son and his mom and get some rest while I manage baby at the hospital overnight, and then get picked up to go home in a day or two and come home to a husband who isn’t out-of-his-mind exhausted (this may be the best scenario.)

I can’t believe it’s five weeks away (and there is a chance my doctor won’t let me go beyond 39 weeks which, good ol math tells us is FOUR weeks away.) FOUR WEEKS until I knock on wood have ANOTHER kid. Life is so strange. I have definitely adjusted to being mom to one. My son is awesome.  I don’t see him as a little kid. I mean, I do in that he’s just innocent and honest and has those moments of pure joy that only someone without a grasp on the hours of the world can have. But he’s also just this little person with his own ideas and opinions and needs. And I love him to pieces…

And I don’t know how I’m going to love another kid but I’m told you just do. I think I can. I’m crazy and want 3 kids. I feel like at the end of the day, what matters to me most is family. I grew up with such a big extended family and now it’s really just us. My husband has some cousins nearby with older kids, but we don’t see them often (even pre COVID.) I wish I could be more social with them but they’re just rather adult and normal and I don’t know how to connect with adult and normal people. I mean now we can talk about kids, which is something to talk about, but I just feel like a teenager around them and they’re all such grown ups. I may be 37 but I get along with people who are mentally 16, which is the problem. They are super nice, but if I went to dinner or drinks alone with them (esp the two women who are in their early 40s who are both super nice but just superrrr normal) it would just be awkward. Not that I really connect with my extended family, but they’re at least east coast types who have big personalities and I feel a bit more comfortable around them. Anyway, I want to build my own family. And I can… I have. And to me, 2 kids is great and 3 is even better. Sure, there’s no guarantee my future kids will not be little demons but… I don’t know… my heart wants a fairly big family. Not huge. But 3 seems like the right number. It always has to me. I’ll get through #2 and see if I still feel this way. I’ll be 38 before I can start trying for #3, and I’m throwing around the idea of doing IVF both to minimize risk of defects at that age and also sex selection. Which is horrible in my politically correct mind where one should not care about the sex of their children but then I also really want to have a girl and I think I’d be sad if I didn’t at least try to make that happen. IVF will be expensive, so I’m saving up for it, but at 38/39 even if I didn’t want to do it for sex selection I still might need it. So that’s possibly in my future. But for now, I want to have a healthy birth and a healthy baby and get to know my new kiddo.

My heart is so ready to see my son meet his sibling. He’s 2.5 years old and seems to sort of get that a baby is coming. He knows I’m growing a baby and we watch YouTube videos of funny babies so he understands what a baby is. I tell him baby is coming in January and he says “NO! FEBRUARY!” and he often points to my stomach and says “BABY!!” I hope he does well with all the change coming up… the move next week (we’ve been bringing him to the house often and he definitely is comfortable being there, but I don’t know how he’ll feel when we no longer can come back to the apartment) and then they’ll be a new kid living with us! But in February grandpa will be moving in and that will be great for him since grandpa is his best friend. Grandpa has a fall and hasn’t been to the doctor as he apparently didn’t enroll in Medicare Part B (eventually I’ll write another post re: my learnings of Medicare’s insanity) and he also wants to avoid doctor due to COVID concerns (which I understand) so grandpa who is living with us to help with our son when we have our new baby will be less able to help and also prevent us from hiring help until vaccines come out since we can’t risk exposing him to the virus, so there’s that. At least grandma loves to watch our son as well and she never uses her time off so she can spend some time with us and  our son too, even if she doesn’t live with us. It will all work somehow. I don’t know how people do this without any help. I just want us all to survive.

I’m so ready for 2021. And filling the holes in my house and those in my heart opened during my last birth. It’s been a rough 2.5 years. Through all of it, I’ve held down a job, increased by net worth substantially, and have set my family up for a clear path to $2.5M in net worth by the end of 2021 or early 2022. We should clear $2M in the next week, once the rest of my stock vests, even after all the taxes I owe for this year. I don’t know how that doesn’t feel like an accomplishment… not long ago I was looking at $1M like… that’s never going to happen, and here we are, $2M with 1.5 kids and a mortgage and so many crawl space and attic entrances!

Things are really good, despite being also not so good. I want to see my mom again soon (even though she’s a narcissist, I still miss her), and I want to see my sister and my extended family and I want life to go back to normal. I want my husband’s grandmother to kick COVID’s ass (this woman will live to 110) and I want to have one of those childbirths that starts with contractions at home and ends with a birth at the hospital where baby comes out screaming in a good way. I can’t plan for 5 years from now or 3 years from now at this point. It is now until April 1, 2022. That is all that matters. We get through this, I keep my job, we don’t get sick, we pay our mortgage on time, we fill those house holes (maybe with the play doh we’re giving our son for Christmas), and we learn how to be adults. Maybe we too can become normal adults and I can go to dinner with my husband’s cousins (or invite them over) and discuss such things as my son’s school and how to maintain a backyard and house hole filing. Or whatever normal adults talk about.

What’s clear is that this now is life and I’m going to live it the best I can. Accept the holes as part of what makes it interesting. And survive until April 1, 2022, with 15 months of potential life-changing net worth growth ahead, I’m in such a good place to set my family up for many years of relative stability (even if we stay in a HCOL area), and for once I feel really good about making it. Not forever. But 15 months. I got this. Maybe even the holes will be filled in by then.

Real Estate & Rent

Did I mention I hate home ownership? Like, despise it. With a passion.

Leave a comment

I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve put into our already painful overpriced plot of Bay Area land/house/box that we will live in, hopefully without major issues, for the next years of our lives.

It isn’t even the cost that’s getting to me. It’s that the more we spend, the more of a nightmare management of the home is. From too many decisions to make, to not feeling at all equipped to properly oversee contractors who are literally putting holes in our floors and walls, I am just over it. And there is still so much to do.

Yes yes yes I know this blog is filled with first world, still-have-a-job-during-the-horror-that-is-a-horribly-managed-global-pandemic problems. Sue me. I realize I’m fortunate. I’m blessed. Or, whatever. Yes. True. All of that. But, that doesn’t change the panicked feeling I have when I arrive at my house to check on something unrelated and the contractor’s subcontractor, who has already put in the beginning of plumbing work for the vanity, says “your vanity is 72″ right?” and I’m like… uh… no, 66″ — I confirmed that multiple times with the GC in our What’s App chat (btw, all the contractors like to tout using What’s App for communication, but this just means they can ignore you even more by saying “ok” to things you write in What’s App but then apparently not actually read them.

I’m not going to claim I’m an easy client. I’m particular. But for 25,000 I hope I get to be a little particular. Maybe that’s not enough money to merit particularness. In total we’re spending about 35k on the bathroom. I feel like that’s a lot. I mean, that’s the new car we’re not getting for a while. So. But I can’t be as hands on as I’d like because COVID and being pregnant and all. It’s already dangerous meeting my contractor while he’s in the bathroom and I’m in the hall. It’s stupid. I’m being stupid. After being so careful during the first half of my pregnancy, I’m risking my life over a bathroom.

But it kind of has to get done. It’s not there anymore. Well, the subfloor is there. And the studs. And some drywall they didn’t take down. I don’t know if they should have taken it all down. But it’s still there so. We need a bathroom. We need this bathroom to get done.

I still need to buy tile. It’s hard for me to visualize what things look like without seeing them done, and tile options are overwhelmingly limited yet awful. I don’t want too much grout, but large tile is not relaxing to me. Ok, so bathrooms are like, my thing. I like to relax in a nice tub. Get away from it all. As much as possible in a house with two little kids, a husband, and a father-in-law. So this is very important to to me. Maybe too important. But between how much I’m spending on it and wanting to feel GOOD about it on the other side of construction, I am freaking out about every detail and yet unable to properly manage this project.

That’s not to mention the nine thousand other things going on in the house right now that we’re trying to get done before we move in (spoiler alert, it’s not all getting done before we move in.) We decided we can’t justify paying another 3000 for January rent (plus I will be having a baby sometime in January and we want to be somewhat settled before that happens), so we made the call to move on Dec 21.  A month out from my due date. Baby could come sooner, but G-d willing, baby will keep cooking through the move.

Will I have functional electricity and plumbing? That’s another story.

We’re getting the panel replaced. It has taken a month and a half for my electrician to get an appointment with the electric company. So that’s happening in January after we move in. Hopefully that’s not a big deal. Seems like most of that work will be done outside. Jan 7 isn’t that far away.

The HVAC is getting done now. The crew seems to know what’s up. And in this case its all the new vents. And the furnace. Now in the attic. I hope they’re doing this all right. 20k. Including AC. We didn’t have AC. Remind me to never buy a Bay Area house without AC again? Pretty please and thank you. My husband, who I put in charge of researching cost of putting AC into a home without it, made a comment once that it would be under 10k if there was already ductwork in the home. He missed the whole part about if your ductwork is from 1966 and filled with asbestos and in your crawl space you’re going to want to put in new ductwork anyway and that will cost 20k. And require putting holes everywhere in your house. That will cost TBD but surely a few thousand to fill. Thanks husband. I don’t blame him – this shit is confusing and complicated as new homeowners, and I always expected things to be expensive, but it is just like … everything is expensive and complicated…

So there are holes in my floor? Who will fix them? How do I find a trusted floor repair service to do this? Many floor companies I’ve talked to apparently won’t do a job this small. The super sketch ones will. Do I go super sketch? Do I keep looking? I don’t know. There is a 3×3 hole in my hall closet into the crawl space. I mean, that’s kind of cool. who doesn’t want a 3×3 hole in their closet into the crawl space with no cover? It will be a show piece for the house cooling party that we’re throwing once we’ve all had two doses of COVID vaccines. Check out our new house — check out our new hole in the ground. Want to see the bathroom? Oh, well, look at those beautiful studs! Who needs a toilet when you can pee into the hole where the shower once was? Crawl space is amazing peeps.

I hired a gardener. I know nothing about plant life except it seems like it should be more green than not green. Gardener was hired because I had an emergency need to prep house for termite fumigation situation (apparently that’s a big deal) and someone who I knew through an old hobby responded to my post on Facebook in a random local group and said her husband can help. And he turned out to be a gardening service owner. And he gave me a quote for bi-weekly gardening service. 125 a month. Ok. But who does he hire to do the work? What do they actually get paid? I’m guessing these men doing the work are undocumented immigrants, which I’m not ok with, but I’m uncomfortable asking. And I’m worried about what they actually get paid. But it also seems most gardening services are owned by white dudes who have undocumented immigrants do the work. I don’t now. Maybe they are documented. How would I find out without making it uncomfortable to answer? I’m morally opposed both to hiring people who are undocumented and even mores morally opposed to paying some white dude 125 a month (which doesn’t even seem like that much) to pay people 10 an hour to do the work. Which, maybe they get more than that, but I would like to know. And I have too much social anxiety and panic to ask. But at least my horrifying field of doom grass has been cut. It looks like its dying. It’s winter. I guess that’s normal. Is that normal? The pepper bush is the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Trees seem ok. The gardeners cut a wire to the lights in the front of our house. Didn’t tell me. I asked and he said they did it, but they fixed it, or something. I don’t think its fixed. I want to fire them but I don’t have time and now it’s awkward because it’s the husband of someone I sort of know who I might meet again. And I don’t have time to find a new gardener yet. So for now, they are going to have to do.

I bought too many things for the bathroom. What does that mean? Let’s just say 3 giant vanities (same one, 3 colors) were delivered to my driveway from Home Depot. Poor husband nearly broke his back getting them inside. I wanted to see the colors in person. But in hindsight that was dumb. Ordered a blue, grey, and white one. Leaning towards white. Was always leaning towards white. Home Depot supposedly will pick up a return for free, but that didn’t go so well the other day when we scheduled a return and couldn’t be at the house all day for pick up. We still don’t know if anyone came to pick up the items. One thing is for sure, we’re not going to be able to lift it and get it back to the store ourselves. So we have to return about 5000 of merchandise within 30 days or its ours to keep. Uh. Ok, bad job me. Blame my husband for getting stuck on the idea of a blue vanity. I’m aiming to win him over with purple walls (we both like purple) so we can keep the vanity white, and make it easy to go natural when I decide I’ve had enough of this house and need to sell it in about 2 months.

Oh, some costly-but-happy things… My new washer and dryer is being delivered in a week. Woohoo. The current ones appear to be from 1966 and even my husband (who was very adamant about not replacing them as long as they work) made a comment that they seem to be useless. So, I splurged (because why not, I’m spending all my money anyway) on some nice GE front loaders. At the very least in this house o mess of mine, I can have clean clothes. I mean, if the new electric panel ever gets put in. And someone can confirm the current wiring in the laundry room won’t destroy the new washer and dryer. It might. I don’t understand electric other than our house was not wired correctly. Much is not grounded. Some outlets are. Circuits are not set up right. I don’t know. Is my house going to burn down the first time I do a load of wash in my new sparkly sapphire blue washer? Possibly. That’s one way to clean clothes.

We need a new garage door. The old one is not only manual, but it is mostly broken. I mean, you can bang at it for a few minutes and get it to open if you’re strong enough. We dream of an electric garage opener.

How was this house 1.65M again? Would I have done better buying a 2M house? Did we get screwed? I don’t know, Zillow seems to think it’s worth that. Is Zillow fucking with me? Did Zillow spend 30 minutes having a panic attack trying to open the garage door the other day? That has to knock the Zestimate down at least 100k right?

There is still a random “wine closet” broken refrigerator thing with a lock on it with no key in our garage that the sellers left for us. Thanks sellers. Um. We need to fix our doors as well. And I’m supposedly putting in a door frame for the open nook in my son’s room so there can be a closet there a well.

Did I mention I’m having a baby in T-43 days? And trying to NOT be stressed right now?

Yea, moving in the last month of my third trimester. Great idea peeps.

Real Estate & Rent

Reason #27482837 Why I Hate Being a Homeowner and Other First World Rich Person Problems

11 Comments

1.7M. You’d think after spending 1.7M on under 2000 square feet maybe you would own a property that doesn’t need a cent more spent on it for at least a few years. Oh, I knew we would have to pay for a gardener given my husband and I don’t have much of a green thumb — or time — to take care of our tiny park. And undoubtedly little things would come up here and there, or so I’ve been told. But I guess I was both naive and exhausted in the home buying process (as we all last few weeks of negotiating contracts for work to be done) and so here I am… 1.7M in and about 70k-100k of work in process, and that isn’t even getting us to the house of our dreams. Just a house we can live in.

I don’t fully blame our realtor for not calling these issues out, though in hindsight I wish I had a realtor who would help us really understand the costs of fixing some pretty basic things that I just missed. I should have been a more informed buyer. At the same time after shopping for over 2 years and looking in areas where 1300 sq ft goes for 1.8M+ I got jaded and desperate. I had a few target neighborhoods in a city I didn’t really want to live in, but I told myself (based on what friends and family members said) this is a starter home and I should focus on its potential, not its current state, as long as it was livable.

I still don’t know if I overpaid. The neighborhood is quite the mix of homes. Ours is on the higher end for sure. But we also have a but more property than other homes in the area. My brilliant thought was that more property gives us more room to grow in the future — for us, or to add value to the house, or both.

Well, I’m a homeowner now. No going back. I like the neighborhood for the most part. I kind of also jumped at the chance to buy something unreasonably far from my current job so it will be easier logically to move on in a year or two once I’m fully vested. Ie instead of buying the home 15 minutes from my current job, where it would be awfully hard to leave unless they kicked me out the door. So I bought this house, in a way, as a gift to myself of freedom, a ticket to whatever is next.
I may have made a mistake in buying this particular house, but I am not sure. I didn’t have to deal with a crazy bidding war—but the neighborhood we bought in has less of that going on for most of the houses, with the exception of a few high target areas. I wonder if the home was overpriced in the first place. Who knows. It doesn’t matter much as selling it at any point will cost at least 6% of the sales value, which is a giant number. So I would like to at least experience a little of the Bay Area magic where these pricy homes go up in value so fast that they cover those costs and them some when you sell. I’m not so optimistic about that—especially given how much we are putting into the house NOW.

Did I understand what ungrounded electric means, or how much it costs to fix it? No. Did I realize that the forced heating ducts would not work for a new AC system and to put in AC it would cost $20k vs $5k. No. Did I realize that to replace the ancient washer and dryer I would need not only a new circuit for $500 plus $300 for every outlet in the room, but I wouldn’t actually be able to permit it because the kitchen’s electric is such a mess if a city inspector gets near it they will make us rip the entire kitchen out to redo the wiring? Nope. Did I understand that getting a bathtub in the bathroom (instead of a shower) and redoing the old tile and fixtures would cost $35k? Well, I knew it wouldn’t be cheap, but was in a bit of denial about how much it would cost.

Beyond costs (which I’ll itemize below), the whole process of finding contractors has been incredibly stressful. I’ve interviewed dozens for each job and at the end of the day am unsure if I picked the right ones. I backed out of one bathroom remodel contract at the last minute (the project manager was very aggressive and I felt that would maybe be bad when I needed to ask him anything during the project) and switched to a smaller firm where the owner is involved more in the day to day. Then, yesterday, I realized in the blur of contract signing I managed to negotiate for little details like the installation of two electric plates but did not read the payment terms at all. Since my husband is pretty much useless when it comes to anything money related it is on me to catch such things. And half asleep in my third trimester is not a good time for me to be signing $25k contracts. I realized, yesterday, that we agreed to paying for basically everything up front. I dumbly thought we would be protected by CA’s $1000 down law, but apparently they can require payment on the start of each piece of the project vs completion. In looking at other contract I almost signed, I see a much more reasonable payment schedule—all on completion of the items. Well, fuck me. I just hope this contractor does good work and doesn’t walk before it’s done. He has enough reviews online that at least it seems I have some leverage in being able to call out anything horrific in the partnership, but I still will be out 24k, minus the $1k I get to pay when everything is complete.

I’m also rushing for good reason but rushing is never good when it comes to being smart. I’m due with a baby in two months. Every month we don’t move in is costing an extra $2500 in rent, plus we are losing my FIL’s $2k towards the mortgage of $7k a month. So we are paying basically $10k a month to not live in the house right now. Well, $7k since we are living in the apartment, but still—what a waste (did I mention this post is about first world rich people problems?)

The bathroom situation is especially overwhelming right now. I still do not understand why half the contractors said it would take 1-2 months to get a permit at the moment, while mine managed to get it in a day. This seems highly suspect. At least there is a permit so that means things will have to pass inspection. Ok, good. I’m tired of all these times with unpermitted work. Yet my contract says nothing about having to pass inspection (the other from the firm I didn’t hire actually has a payment chunk due on inspection passing.) I feel woefully unprotected and dumb right now.

The good(ish) news is that if I can purchase in stock or readily available supplies (which limits our choices immensely), they supposedly can get the bathroom done in under 4 weeks. So my goal of having it done by or soon after Jan 1, when I hope to move in, is within reach. I’m torn on buying in stock whatever vs nicer finishings — the construction is so expensive that it is pretty clear I won’t be remodeling this bathroom again for many years if ever. I want it to both be really nice for resale value (my heart still says if I earn and save enough money in the next 5 years (and am not stuck in a great job nearby) I want to sell it and move to my target neighborhood) and nice for our forever home should this turn out to be that (which quite frankly is more likely as my husband and I aren’t fans of change.)

So every little material decision is a project in and of itself. Shower system? Maybe we like one in stock but a part is missing for the color we like. Tub? They all have bad reviews or some issue. Tile? Husband and I can’t agree on anything. Vanity? Don’t ask. Ok do. The vanity is probably the biggest headache of them all. Cheapo vanities in standard sizes are readily available, but will they help resale value? The bigger issue is the space we have for the vanity. I always assumed vanities should go against the wall. Well we have about 66” to fill in that case. My contractor says we can go up to 69”. There are no 66-69” custom vanities. We can buy a 60” freestanding vanity that is centered between the toilet and the wall—or replace with something similar to what is in there now (18” linen cabinet and 48” vanity — but these are hard to find non custom and the linen cabinet adds another big cost) or we do semi custom and get a modular (still cheapo yet expensive) system at 66” but have to pay an extra $1k+ for custom top to fit and installation. Also my contract says something about how our cabinet maker must do the installation (another miss on my part) and the cabinet makers seem to not do this or charge a lot for this service.

Nicer custom vanities will not only cost $5k+, they will take at least 8 weeks to arrive. So that means there is no way the bathroom will be done before baby comes. While I’m tempted to discuss this option with my contractor — getting all the work done and having the vanity installed later in spring with the plumbing work done then — I just feel like it would be a horrible idea to leave this unfinished with a new baby and have it’s lack of completion hanging over me the whole time. I think for my sanity better for it to be done with lower end materials than missing the vanity for the next few months and hoping my contractor will finish the job months after I’ve paid him most of the total amount.

So the goal is between now and end of day Tuesday, order EVERYTHING. Try to buy in stock items, and buy things that look nice enough but are low end enough that one day if we want to replace one item we can maybe do this without having to rip out the entire bathroom again (and save costs by hiring individual contractors vs a GC.) But I don’t trust people esp people who make $25k in 4 weeks and I don’t have the knowledge to properly inspect their work beyond aesthetic issues. What if things are installed wrong? Well I’ll only know after the fact. Then I pay someone else to fix them.

ah the joys of new home ownership paired with trying to not get fired while surviving the last 2 months of pregnancy with my second child.

I went into all of this accepting we would spend about $50k on the house up front. I thought this would be enough. It’s looking like it will all be closer to $100k. I sold a chunk of stock so I have the money but I also realize that 1. That money has lost out on significant gains in the market I will never get back and 2. We should have just sucked it up and bought a house that was 100-200k more that had all this shit done already and that could be paid off at 2.65% over 30 years. Now, if buying a gone, I would definitely be looking at the fixtures, the electric work, the status of the HVAC system (and not going by my husband’s comment that he thinks it will be $5k if there is existing ductwork.)

Here is how things are adding up:

-$35k – bathroom remodel (could be more)

-$10k – new electric panel and recessed lights throughout house (does not include rewiring, which we have decided to hold on and address with subsequent remodels)

-$20k new HVAC system and asbestos removal

– $2.5k kill termites

– $1k roof repairs

– $2k – washer and dryer set

-$1k – new wiring for laundry room

-$1k – misc, new locks, random heavy crap sellers left being hauled away

– $1k closet doors for kid’s room so they don’t smash their fingers on the built in unit (there is a closet indent but the sellers got rid of doors)

-$5k patching everything contractors do where holes are left, replacing flooring (hoping this doesn’t cost more than this!)

$5.5k – new garage door and wiring (replace manual door)

That’s it for now. I guess. We are still looking into re wiring since nothing is grounded and that seems bad. All the outlets are also upside down (who does that?) and I am probably going to soon spend $5-$10k to plant some trees in my backyard covering a not so great view, and add a playground for my kids. And there are other landscaping things I’d like to update so it is more sustainable and less expensive to manage. I found a gardener for $125 a month, so that’s a new forever cost. It’s important though since everything is dying!

I am sure I’m forgetting things above —but the grand total is about $83k right now… and I’m sure that we will find $17k in additional repairs and items to fix once we move in.

And, yes, I should have bought a house that cost $100k more! At this rate. And for all of this I get to move into a 100×100 square foot room since my FIL will be taking the master suite. Which I am ok with, but for the amount I’m spending on all this, I still feel kind of sad. I feel good about giving my kids a house, I can tell my son is excited to have a house as much as he understands of our move at this point (he likes to run around the house and calls it the house with green grass.) So that makes me warm and fuzzy inside. But not $1.7M + $100k I’m up front costs earn and fuzzy.

What this house really needs to make it “the” house is probably going to cost more than it will ever be worth. The sellers converted a full bedroom into a master bathroom that is designed in the way you would think a bunch of old people would design a master bath spa retreat (without permits, of course.) My dream is to bump out the house in the back (doable) and turn the master bath back into a bedroom (we want a 4br house) and then add a new master bath that is lovely and not quite so insane. It seems possible we could even add a small 5th bedroom in this addition, which may be helpful for resale / living with 2 kids and 2 parents with work from home jobs and possibly one more kid. And/or I’d like to add on in front and put in a nice living room, and redo the kitchen and laundry area and current living areas and open them up to make a super cozy family room. The reality is it really doesn’t make sense to do this work, probably ever. Our best bet is staying for 3-5 years, approaching this house as our starter home, hoping we at least make back what we paid for it when we sell, and being much more informed buyers when we look to purchase our true forever home.

I’m hopeful the work we are doing now adds value to the house. Given I think we probably overpaid it won’t help with sales price much in a few years but we should be able to get back what we paid as long as the housing market doesn’t tank (and if it does we can then afford to move to a nicer house for less anyway.) I worry about the master bath hurting resale value, and while I think my idea to convert that back into a bedroom and add master bath elsewhere with a small bump out is a good one, I realize that project will be another $100k or more and just a mess to do.

I just want to feel good about this purchase. But I don’t. It’s my own fault, but I feel like I’ve been had. The winners here are my realtor, the sellers, their realtor, my contractors, my neighbors (who benefit from high cost of sale of home for their own home values), the city (now getting taxes off a $1.7M value vs much less) and just about everyone but us. Ok, ok, so we have a house. A house to build memories in. A house to call home and never get kicked out of as long as we pay our mortgage and taxes and our subcontractors don’t sue us because I didn’t realize that’s a thing that can happen if you pay your primary contractor and they don’t pay their subs. Fucking fun times y’all.

I feel grateful and fortunate to be able to buy a Bay Area house in the first place. I realize it is a huge privilege to be at this point. But, geez, it really is a nightmare. It raises so many questions about if we made the right choice, if we should have just stayed renters forever, if we are going to spend the rest of our life house poor and fixing shit that keeps breaking vs just enjoying life —or if this is a smart decision that will be both fruitful in the stability it provides and maybe even grow in value in some sort of crazy way that makes it a reasonably decent investment (unlikely) or at worst a break-even luxury purchase.

All I know right now is I need to figure out what vanity to buy… and not stress about it to the point I go into pre term labor.

Real Estate & Rent

Trying to Find Happiness in Any of This

7 Comments

There are real reasons to celebrate these days. For starters, Biden won the election. While it wasn’t a landslide as many hoped, at least he received enough votes to push evil out. I’m not exactly optimistic about the future of our country with so many people willing to vote for a racist man who doesn’t believe in science, but for now, there is reason to be happy.

I’m trying. To feel a little good right now. Because as my own world spirals further out of control and comfort, I can rest a big easier knowing there will be adults in the White House for the next four years to navigate us through the dark days ahead of this pandemic and whatever other surprises 2021-2025 has in store.

But I miss my family, and normalcy, and fear the choices I made in the past week (getting a voluntary 3D ultrasound, having contractors over to my house, going to view tile in a local showroom) will kill me, my husband, and/or his parents. And yet, I feel like the only way to stay remotely sane is to try to live life somewhat. But to live life somewhat is a huge risk right now. And I don’t like taking such risks. Yet my mind is past the point of embracing logic. I’m worn out, mentally, physically, psychically. I am not doing anything that stupid (of course I’m wearing a mask in all social interactions) but I feel like there is really no difference between doing what I am doing and going out and seeing other humans or sending my son to daycare, which we are not doing. What if after being so “careful” my few deviances from being smart about avoiding any and all germs lead to me on a vent having a c-section where the doctors try to save my baby and accept I am a lost cause?

This isn’t just crazy pessimistic talk, it is all real possibility. I should be locked in a bunker right now and instead here I am making dumb decisions. Trying to move things forward with a house that cost too much that will cost even more to prepare for move in. I’m regretting becoming a home owner already. I feel sick to my stomach over what I’ve done with this decision. I’m only getting through it by telling myself I’m going to give it 3 years and if home ownership doesn’t work out I will sell, probably for a significant loss, but that loss will be worth it to return to life as a renter. Or maybe in 3 years time I’ll love being a home owner. I doubt it, but maybe. I did it because why? Because deep down I’ll never feel good enough unless I own a home. I don’t particularly like the home I purchased (or the 100 square foot bedroom my husband and I will be sharing while my FIL lives in the 450 sq ft master suite) but I dug my hole there so I’m going to lie in it and be claustrophobic and deal with it for 3 years. What’s 3 years anyway? I just wish I wasn’t going to lose about $160k when I sell. That’s going to be a rough pill to swallow. But that’s the price of dumb decisions.

With home ownership everything is incredibly complicated. Sure, you can pay people to do things, but it’s hard to know who to trust. One contractor may be really good at one thing and have great reviews but you find out the thing you hired them for is outside of their expertise—despite their confident talk about how they would do the project. For instance, HVAC guys giving you advice on moving an attic entrance. Or electricians explaining you need to update your circuits when maybe you don’t really have to — or maybe you do, because you bought a 1960s house that still has mostly original electric and ductwork because you’re dumb. Because your realtor was tired of you and just wanted you to buy a house already. Or she didn’t know any better. Or this is what happens in the Bay Area when you want a decent-sized lot and square footage. Or maybe you overpaid by a lot because your realtor convinced you to put in an early offer. Because they’re all in cahoots. Because in real estate you can trust no one but yourself and when you don’t know anything you are going to get screwed.

Right now I’m looking at about 100k of work up front. Not everything is a must have, but everything is going to be a pain in the ass to do once we move in (though permits are taking so long right now I doubt we will actually get everything done before we move in — did I mention between rent and mortgage we are paying 10k a month right now?!!?!) My husband is up to his ears in work at the moment, with his biggest conference of the year coming up soon, and I’m just trying to survive working full time, transitioning to a new role (and clinging on to employment) at 29 weeks pregnant while trying to figure out how the hell to project manage a house.

I feel sick. Defeated. I want to feel hopeful and happy and all the good things one should feel when becoming a home owner (supposedly.) But I can’t stop the nausea. The dizziness. The constant sense of dread. Maybe if my husband had the energy to do this with me, i would be ok. But he’s exhausted too. And behind on his work. I’m tempted to recommend that at the end of this year he quit his job. I’m not sure how we can do this with only his 77 year old father helping out watching our toddler during the day, a few days a week. I don’t see how this is doable. And because of COVID we can’t hire outside help. So I’m going to see how it goes through the birth of my child, but I’m seriously thinking of asking him to become a SAHD. That definitely won’t help financially, but maybe I’ll have my husband back. If I can keep my job next year, I’ll make enough so that he doesn’t have to work. The keyword is “if” and then, what next? My job is only high paying next year due to my stock. After that I am back to 175k a year plus bonus if I get my bonus plus a little stock but not much. I’ll be at 200-250k at best which isn’t bad but isn’t enough to afford the house probably. And that’s IF i keep the job. Like, forever. With my 1.5 hour each way commute once we start commuting again.

I am trying to take it one day at a time. In 2-3 years I can sell. I’ll consider this an adventure in home ownership. A very expensive adventure. Maybe we will get lucky and break even. I was stupid and bought one of the more expensive homes in the neighborhood— the value is in the larger lot—but the home itself is meh. I mean, if the plumbing and HVAC and electric are updated it might be worth more, but not necessarily enough to pay for said plumbing and HVAC and electric upgrades.

Alas, I feel myself slipping towards a dark place. I am not interested in ending my life (yet) as it isn’t that bad—it’s all salvageable and I do want to have my second kid and I like being a mom and I know worst case we sell this house and I convince my husband to move to any other state in this country where I can buy a nice house with cash and early retire and try to find a low-stress job to pay the bills and feel productive without all of this crazy $7k mortgage stress for the next 30 years. Don’t get me wrong, there are times I think maybe if I get covid and fail to be able to breathe it will be meant to be—I’m so worn out, so tired of all of this chasing and trying to make this all work that I kind of don’t care anymore. I don’t want to suffer, I’m certainly terrified of pain and the fear of what it would be like to die, should I be aware of it, but I kind of am past the point of it feeling like it matters much. I mean, after I have my kid. I want my kid to survive and I will do whatever it takes for that to happen. But at this point, at 29+ weeks, they would cut my baby out of me and baby could survive. Again, I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m sure thinking about how little I like living these days. It seems the more money I save, the worse it gets. Maybe that will shift at some point. But I should be happy now and I’m not. I just feel like I got myself caught up in something horrible with no good way out.

It is lonely and scary and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel good about any of this. But it is what it is. And I realize I am so much better off than most people in the world. I should be grateful. I bought a fucking 1.5M+ house. Who does that? I mean, in the Bay Area it’s not that crazy but it’s still kind of crazy. A 1.5M+ house with an old electric panel that may catch fire any minute and asbestos in the ducts and no AC in a quite warm part of California and a whole bunch of other mess that we have to fix (probably.)  I should have kept renting. That would have been smart. But instead, here I am—proud(?) homeowner. Defeated by myself. Trying to just go numb, because that is better than feeling anything right now.

Real Estate & Rent

I’m Pregnant: With a New House

8 Comments

I feel like I’m having twins. Except one is a baby and the other is a house. My first house. My house. Well, our house. In the middle of our street. In the middle of my check book.

After a 300k+ downpayment, you’d think we could stop bleeding cash for a while. But a “new” house in these here parts is an old house. A pre 1970s house. Which, when I bought it, didn’t seem that old — given many houses here are from the 1920s. Then, after buying it, I realized it is pretty old. Old enough to need a whole bunch of new things.

I set aside 50k for first year repairs–and I’m going to spend it all up front. Fumigation – 3k. Roof – 2k. Electric – 15k. HVAC – 15k-20k. And that’s before we get to the nice-to-haves, like an electric garage door opener, a hallway bathroom remodel (so we can have a bathtub), and maybe epoxy on the garage floor to make it into a gym (ok that’s a luxury but “only” 2k.) I don’t love the layout of the house and the two bedrooms we will be living in for the foreseeable future (while my FIL lives in the master bedroom suite) are tiny. I’d like to add on to them and rip out everything in the house and redo it all but… ok, I’m not that crazy. Maybe I am. But I’m also actually pregnant. And tired. And not ready to complete a massive remodel and cash out all my stock to build on to this house. It will probably never happen. I need to be happy with the house as is.

I’m trying to be. It’s scary to be a homeowner. I think homeownership is kind of bullshit but I’m doing it anyway. It’s a total scam. The “American dream” my ass. In a HCOL area it takes 35+ years to break even, if that. That’s not counting all the upgrades you put into your house because it’s your house. You know, home ownership and this dream is really just the government wanting to convince people to take care of a little plot of land and pay more taxes for that land and feel stuck. Being stuck is good for the stability of a nation. Not so much for its people.

But I did it anyway? Why. Oh, I don’t know. As our networth creeps towards 2M, and as we’re approaching baby #2, it seemed like the right thing to do. Give my kids some stability. It’s good for them, supposedly. I don’t know. I lived in the same house my entire childhood and look how I turned out–and now I’m just an emotional mess on my mom having to sell that home. And I’m almost 37. Maybe I’d be better off if I moved around as a kid and didn’t have such an emotional attachment to a piece of real estate.

Anyway, I did it. The home is ours. And right now it’s actually ours but we can’t go in it because the sellers have a rent back and they’ll be out on Nov 7. Then it’s ours ours. Ours to put a massive tent over and fumigate. Ours to replace the old fire hazard electrical panel. And redo the vents so we can put in AC. Ours to move our king size bed into the 100 square foot bedroom with a tiny closet because that’s what my life is now. Spending 1.5M+ on a home should buy some luxury but it doesn’t here. I have a little more space than a 1.3M home but not much more. I don’t know what I have. A 1.5M+ headache. A 7k a month mortgage. A whole lot of new stress. Neighbors — god — people I will have to get to know and can’t avoid if for any reason I want to avoid them.

I’ll miss my apartment — but we couldn’t stay in our one bedroom anyway. I’ll miss my neighborhood and town, and the last town I lived in where we tried to find a place to buy but gave up with everything going 300k above ask. I feel like this is kind of the end of everything, versus the start of it, which is the wrong way to be approaching home ownership. But it’s kind of a let down. You save and save and save and then the best you can do is buy a half-decent home with a lot of repairs needed that’s over an hour from your office. Is it an accomplishment? I don’t know. Hard to say. Maybe it will feel like it is when we have it fixed up. When it’s really ours ours. When I can tell my son this is his house, for real. His front door. His bedroom. His backyard.

I’m looking forward to the space. The grass I can lie on during the day with no one giving me funny looks. The same grass I can sleep in without worrying I’ll wake up and my keys will be gone. All the walls that we can do whatever we want with. So much responsibility. 85k a year of it, plus whatever it costs to keep the house “alive.” What a fancy life I lead.

Networth, Real Estate & Rent

Cash Needed for Buying a Million Dollar Home

11 Comments

We just purchased a $1.6M home. That isn’t a huge home here in the Bay Area, but it’s also not the cheapest home we could buy–especially of the 3 bedroom / 2 bath variety. But it was large in terms of square footage and with an oversized lot in a neighborhood we wanted to buy in (or, well, a block away) I ran all the variables in my head and decided while this isn’t the one now it definitely can be with some work. It’s also in an up-and-coming area and I think the value will hold in 5-10 years time, if we do decide to sell.

Rules for Buying a Million Dollar Home

I have a few home buying rules that are a little nutty but they work for my oddly conservative financial brain.

  • 20% down + 3% closing costs
  • 6 Months of home and rent expenses (we will have 1-2 months overlap on rent and house to make the move smooth)
  • 6 months of basic living expenses outside of housing
  • Any taxes due within the next 6 months
  • $50k-$100k “first year fixes” fund (try not to spend all of this, but have available if needed esp when buying an older house)
  • 6 months additional in emergency fund (all monthly costs)

My one additional rule that I am going to stick to (but will be harder) is:

  • No more than 20% of networth in equity at any one time.

Home Equity =

+ Downpayment
+ Principal Paid
+ Any Realistic Gain on Home Value (if sold today)
– Any Realistic Loss on Home Value (if sold today)
– 10% current value of home (cost to sell)
– .30% of any gain over $500k+home maintenance fees

This means that right now, my home equity is worth:

+ $322k
+ $0
+ $0
– $0
– $161k
– $0k
=======
$161k

This means that my remaining AFTER TAX cash & investments should be $805k to have 20% of my networth in my home.

Buying a Million Dollar Home Doesn’t Have to be That Scary

This is what makes buying a $1.6M home less scary, but it also means that before buying a $1.6M home you not only should save a large downpayment, but also an additional $1.1M. Not everyone can do this, or wants to do this before buying a house. It’s possible I should have purchased a house 10 years ago for $800k, where now my mortgage would be $3500 a month, vs $7000 a month (give or take) and I’d have 20 years left to pay it off. But then I wouldn’t have the $1.1M, and I would have definitely gone into home ownership with way too much of my networth in home equity.

I prefer to build up that larger cushion and know that a chunk of my money still has access to the markets, which will likely outperform my house after you factor in lost opportunity cost with the downpayment, etc.

How much of your networth is in home equity?

Real Estate & Rent

24 Days Close, 52 Days Until Move In: Buying a House While Pregnant During COVID is… uh… something else.

3 Comments

My emotions in the last 24 hours have ranged from extreme self satisfaction (I did it — I saved my ass off and bought a mudda f*cking house) to literally crying from the sheer stress of trying to do all the normal crazy things one has to do during closing on a new house–while 5 months pregnant — in the middle of a global pandemic — and wildfire air — and… and… and…

This is really hard folks. I know I can be a bit of a drama queen, but I think this would be hard for anyone.

My husband is my rock. My logic sounding board. Many great things. But I’m the CFO of the household. I’m the one who has saved enough to buy this home. He’s the one who has been there for me long enough to keep me semi sane and make it possible. We’ve both earned this.

That doesn’t make this any easier.

For starters, I want to ensure the home is SAFE when we move in.

Being that we bought in the Bay Area, we went in no contingencies and we (uh) gleefully dropped off a $50k escrow payment and said buh buh $50,000. We can still drop out of the deal for the next 24 days until close, but that $50k… we’re not getting it back.

The seller’s inspection report was rather light. There was a separate pest and roof report which noted repairs needed. I understand nothing of how serious things are and what is really required to fix them.

Seller wanted a 30 day rent back (in Bay Area a “rent back” basically means they get to stay for 30 days for free while we pay their mortgage) so I tried to negotiate credits for the major repairs. That somehow ended up being them giving us $5k towards the closing costs and us basically agreeing to $5k more over the life of the loan. I guess that’s a better deal than paying the $5k up front. But then we’re losing $7k on not being able to actually move in. Numbers, numbers.

So the sellers will fix the roof (out of the credit) before they move out, and supposedly will schedule tenting the week after they move out, or something. I don’t know.

We have other work we want to do. The most important is any safety stuff. There’s some electrical things that need to be fixed. That’s my #1 concern. We need a new electrical panel and some wiring.

My next concern is that the report mentioned that the chimney is separating from the house. Or maybe my next concern is the standing water in the crawl space. Hmm. Both seem concerning. But what to do about them? How urgent are they? Will a chimney fall on my son? We aren’t going to use the chimney… but the bricks are scary.

Other than that, the house seems… maybe ok to live in for a while?

We want to put in AC by next summer. It probably makes to do this before we move in. So we are looking into this option. I have a not-going-to-happen dream about getting a bathtub in the hall bath so I have a tub (which is important to me I’m a big bath person and my son also takes baths.)

But it’s a nightmare trying to get access to the house to get contractors in to quote…

Our initial plan was/is to bring contractors into the house over the next month (they are supposed give us access within 24 hours) and get quotes… but the sellers still live there so that’s proving rather difficult. They’re giving us one Saturday and my realtor has to be there and she’s only available for 3 hours or so. Initially we were trying to do this on a Sunday but I discovered all the contractors are off on Sundays. So now we’re aiming for next Saturday. And scheduling all these folks is a nightmare… plus they need to sign COVID forms to get in the house and we have limitations how many people can be inside at once and anyway it’s not fun.

We SHOULD probably just wait until we move in. But…

All construction work we do before moving in, ideally. Between normal construction dust and COVID and everything else, it seemed reasonable to say we’re going to select contractors now and then start work as soon as we have access to the house in November. We might pay 1-2 more months of rent in our apartment (about $3k per month) PLUS the $7k per month mortgage (yes, that’s $10k per month – forking A) just to get things done without us being in the house.

Outside of the whole $10k a month issue… let me remind all of you (because I certainly have not forgotten) that I’m super preggo and I shall be popping out one new baby sometime in January. Hopefully in January. God willing, January. I am not in the mood to be either living in a house with tons of construction going on in the last month of my pregnancy. But it’s extra complicated because…

We now live about 45 minutes from my in-laws and 30 minutes from my hospital.  That’s not a huge deal except when I go into labor, we need at least one of them to watch our son. Neither live in places where he can stay. Ah, but we have a house! And — isn’t grandpa supposed to be living with you?

Well, yes–this is all true.

If grandpa moves in Jan 1 (and I deliver close to my due date) then we can leave my son at home with him. We still would like to get my mother-in-law there, somehow… but I’m not quite sure how that will happen as my husband will need to drive me to the hospital then drive her back to the house then drive back to the hospital (that’s like 2 and a half hours total — he very well may miss the entire show.) Or… grandpa lives with us, my son stays there, I give birth, after that husband drives grandma to our house and then comes back. Or… I don’t know. I’m still not seeing how this works. And I’d like grandpa not to move in with us until Feb 1. so I can have access to the bathroom tub which is actually an amazingly nice tub (assuming it works) that has jacuzzi jets and everything. I’m not a fancy tub person (I just like deep soaking tubs) but I’m sure being super preggo it will feel good to be in the jacuzzi. Unfortunately the master bedroom doesn’t have a door separating its bathroom from the rest of the house. Bummer. So if he’s living with us, I can’t use that bathroom. I can’t use a bath at all. $7k a month, and I don’t even get a bath. Woe me and my first world problems.

So it probably makes the most sense for us to move in Dec 1 and grandpa to move in Jan 1 and all work to be done to be done between Nov 4 and Nov 30. Which is not a lot of time given thanksgiving is in there and from my understanding contractors can be booked up months out in advance. I’m not sure WHAT we’ll be able to get done by Nov 30. Sounds like prob roof and pest stuff. I’m hoping electrical. Everything else might have to wait.

Waiting– is also complicated. When grandpa moves in, and infant moves in, I don’t think any of us are going to feel good about having contractors in and out of the house for a while. This means that remodeling the bathroom will prob have to wait. AC work… if not done up front… may not happen in time for next summer (my husband is making it a priority to get that done now, and I do think electrical and AC are the 2 things that we should try to get done up front if we can.)

I’m trying to go into this house open minded. My husband gets so mad at me when I change my mind all the time. It’s not that I really have changed my mind, it’s just I have two ways of looking at this…

  1. Our mortgage is $7k a month, which is insane, and having his father live with us to pay $2k a month for a while really helps. This makes our cost more like $6k (mortgage minus deductions plus fixes) which is comparable to what it costs to rent a house, or maybe more by like $12k a year, which I can stomach. My frugal side says woohoo, I’ve bought a $1.6M 3 bedroom, 2 bath home for 2.625% 30 year fixed with 20% down and outside of semi minor repair work, it seems totally livable for a while. The master bedroom, which has a ridiculously large master bathroom (designed not to my taste but that can be fixed eventually and whatever, it’s still nice) will be all ours in prob 2-5 years when my FIL moves out. It is OUR house and I like the neighborhood overall (I think) and I like the schools and I think my kids will enjoy growing up there and maybe I can make friends and I got such a large lot and this will be good. This house isn’t near perfect but it has a lot of things I wanted and I will feel good pulling up to it and knowing it’s my house!
  2. I put $320,000 down and we’re paying $5k-$6k+ a month for this house. As the breadwinner, this is a lot of pressure on me to keep my job. While I feel better about my job stability at the moment than I have in the past, I know I could lose my job at any time. I also now am going to have to deal with a long commute if/when I go back to the office. I do LIKE this house… we looked at a ton of houses and this one checked most of the boxes. It’s missing a 4th bedroom, AC, and a bathroom I can use when FIL is living there, but otherwise, it’s good. It’s like… it’s fine. It’s nice. I knew to get something I really liked I would have to spend at least $2M. So I know this is $400k less than that. It feels like about $400k less than what I would really like. — BUT — man, I worked so hard to save up for this house and for the next 2-5 years of my life, including through the rest of this pregnancy, my healing, and probably one more pregnancy (though we may remodel some by then) I will be basically living in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath house with an in-law unit. It’s a nice house, don’t get me wrong, but the bedrooms (other than the master) are tiny. My husband and I will both be WFH for a while. The house is big but feels small because so much square footage is in the master bedroom. One day I’ll be able to enjoy that. You know, if the stress of home ownership doesn’t kill me before then.

That’s why I’m conflicted. And stressed. And freaking out. All the things. I’m grateful I’m off work this week. I couldn’t handle this stress while working FT. My realtor is SO ready to be done with me. She is always nice and responsive–at this point I know she’s just thinking how she has to grin and bear it for a few more weeks and hopefully we will write her some really nice reviews and she will feel like the last 6 months of putting up with us was worth it.

In the future, though, I’m going with a more experienced realtor. I mean, I’m sure there’s pros and cons to a noob vs someone who prob would have gotten tired of us a while back… but I realize how hard the final negotiations and contract part is, and I wish I had someone who just had more experience with all the ways it could go, and where we could really push back, etc. I’m sure no matter what there is some blindness that comes with the situation (you don’t know what the other offers are) so maybe this all went as well as it could have. We ended up buying for just a little over list, which is pretty much unheard of here, unless the house sucks, and I don’t think it sucks. It has issues, but the location is good, and nothing is unfixable.

Anyway. I’m going nutso. I think I just have to start packing to get my mind off of this insanity. And we’ll do one day at the house with contractors and see what we learn and then just wait until we can get in on Nov 4. Day of reckoning. We’ll be emotionally hungover from election night and certainly the drama that will come with Trump claiming Biden cheated even if Trump wins — seems like as good of day as any to move into a $1.6M house. Right? A democrat with a $1.6M house and no SALT deductions. Yea, that’s me.

Real Estate & Rent

I Think We Just Bought a House. OMFG.

10 Comments

It was bound to happen. After 2 years of on-and-off and very on and very off and very on again looking for a house to buy, we put an offer in and won. Or, at least I think we did. Our sellers supposedly picked us, and they’re signing their counter offer that we signed in the morning.

This is a huge deal. I’m so tired of the entire process that it just feels like a huge relief to be “done” with it (even though our home ownership journey is just beginning.) In order to not totally get in over our head in Bay Area real estate (which is so easy to do) I made some simple rules about buying…

  • NO crazy bidding wars or unethical negotiations
  • Keep mortgage to under ~$7000 / month with space for FIL (who also will contribute to mortgage for a few years)
  • Buy in a neighborhood I can see us living in for many years
  • Buy a big enough lot to be able to expand the house if we want to stay
  • Buy in an area that, if not super close to current job, is close to a strong job market with future options
  • Buy a house that isn’t a fixer upper (ie nothing clearly falling apart, everything generally livable for 5 years without changes)

I think we got most of the above. I feel like we have been dealing with HUMAN sellers, which is nice. They apparently picked our offer over a higher bid because they really liked the heartfelt letter I wrote. I had heard of people winning house buying bids with letters but I wasn’t sure that was a real thing. Apparently, they liked us, because we’re real people, who want a real house to raise our family in. I guess that struck a chord with them. Or maybe my realtor is lying to us. In any case, I feel like while we’re paying A FUDGE TON for this house — both buyer and seller are winners here.

The risk I’m taking is that I am placing a bet on being able to sustain my current job for 15 more months, which includes 5 months of maternity leave (I can get laid off during maternity leave but it’s less likely than if I were working and at risk due to any performance issues — which isn’t a problem right now anyway as I’m finally kicking ass and taking names at work.) So that’s basically 10 working months to vest all my stock. I’ll sell it on vest, which will help me hit my other goals for next year:

  • superfund 2 529 accounts $75k each ($140k total)
  • max out pre-tax 401k, husband’s solo 401k, AND my after-tax account (~94k towards retirement)
  • max out ESPP plan (~$21k)

By doing this, I also can move towards my continuous goal to fix my portfolio diversification — the retirement funds are getting a lot of bond funds and international funds to move away from being too heavy in large cap US stocks. It will take a few years to balance that out, but I’m getting there. Avoiding selling my large caps because they are like 75% cap gains right now and my cap gains rate at the moment is close to 35% with state and fed.

We’re trying to get to $450k cash in hand for down payment, close, and emergency fund. I think after I sell off my upcoming RSU vest this month we’ll be about there.

It’s crazy to think that this is possible… going from basically $0 in 2005 to where I am now. I really don’t know how I got here (well, I do, I tracked it all on this blog) but it still feels like a dream.

Buying this house is terrifying. We are going in no contingencies, as one must do around here to win a house — and giving the owners a 30 day “rent back” (ie live free for 30 days gift.) This would not be a huge deal except I’m due in mid January, and this puts our move in date around end of November. While my husband has promised to do all the hard parts of moving and I can just sit and point to things (and despite what my friends think we don’t have THAT much stuff since we live in a 1 bedroom) it still gets a bit scary thinking of moving in late Nov/ early Dec. It’s possibly at that point something could go wrong with my pregnancy, and that will make moving very difficult for my husband — having to manage moving, kid, and me potentially in the hospital. I’ll be 32 weeks or so at that point, so hopefully it won’t be an issue. But really it’s cutting it close.

Even though owning a home is NOT an investment and is NOT a financially wise decision in a HCOL area like the Bay Area, I feel really good about this purchase. I feel good that the home isn’t perfect and it’s under $1.7M. Anywhere else in the country this sounds like a lot but here it’s really… well… it’s a lot but it’s not much in terms of what you can buy in a house. I like that I’m compromising and getting a 3 bedroom and my FIL will live in the big room and we’ll be living in the smaller 2 rooms. I like that it has room for improvement and that I will enjoy going for walks in the cute neighborhood everyday and love how the neighbors say hi to each other and how in a big sprawling city it has a similar vibe to where I grew up on the east coast. Sort of. At least enough of one where I look forward to meeting my neighbors and maybe even, gasp, making some new friends.

I could have moved to the east bay and spent even less, but that didn’t make sense for many reasons. This price point makes sense to us. I opted out of the peninsula because bidding wars were insane and — when I saw a total fixer mess that we looked at a year ago (that sold for $1.5M) listed at $2.2M with a half-decent flip job, I knew it was time to give up on that city dream. At least for now. Probably forever (I’m really into this 2.65% 30 year fixed loan so it will be hard to find a reason to leave unless rates are this low again and I am super wealthy in a few years.) This is a good, solid house. It has its quirks. The chimney may be slowly detaching from it (ok, that is something I’m worried about and need to get looked at.) But overall, it’s solid. I will feel happy coming home to it everyday. I will feel happy looking out the window at the cute house across the street that reminds me a little bit of the house I grew up in.

I’m glad we didn’t settle on the things that matter the most.

I am so fucking terrified but also excited. I’m turning 37 and buying a house and having my second kid (of maybe 3 kids?) and I’ve kept this job for 3 years as of next month and overall–for me especially–things are going pretty darned well. Sure, the world is falling apart, we have a sociopath for a president and may end up in a civil war come election season, and COVID is still lurking in every corner of air where someone might cough or laugh or breathe, but I feel strangely hopeful. Like, maybe it’s going to be alright for a little while. Like I am not just working and surviving for mere survival.

Seeing my son light up about the “green grass” in the home’s yard — “need to run! need to run in the grass!” he exclaimed — I knew this was the one. I want him to not be stuck inside a tiny one bedroom apartment all day. I want him to be able to run around the yard safely fenced in. To have a little swing set in the backyard and to one day, post COVID, have friends over. To have a house of our own. Life is so fucking short. I’m ready to start living it. For $7k a month. Or, you know, whatever it costs.

 

 

 

Real Estate & Rent

Buying a House in the Bay Area Even Though It’s Probably Going to Burn Down

2 Comments

Anyone on the west coast at the moment is dealing with some ill effects of the insane wildfires raging up and down the coast. Many of us woke up to apocalypitc orange skies earlier this week, and have been coughing through the impact of that atmospheric ash slowly raining on us all weekend. COVID is still raging as well, as is the occasional heat wave, and we’re all stuck in our various apartments and homes that do not come standard with air conditioning.

Yet, I’m still planning on buying an overpriced home here. That will likely set a wildfire to my own FIRE journey. All logical signs point to RENT but I can’t get the buying dream out of my head. At the very least–when times get tough–this will force us to find a way to earn more. This is good for me (I won’t be able to give up) and good for my husband, who hasn’t changed jobs (one part time job) in over 15 years. He has the same home ownership dream I have, so in a way it gets us on the same page regarding finances a bit. I think that will be good. It’s not like I’m just saying we need to save more for retirement (no matter how hard I try, he doesn’t get it and thinks he can live cheap and be fine on his minimal savings.) But a house — he gets that. So at least he will be on board to earn more if (when) shit hits the fan.

I see my own financial life going one of two ways:

  • I get somewhat wealthy. A few years ago, I would have said you’re bonkers if you proposed this idea to me. I had been saving for years and while I had “a lot” in my accounts, it was still no where near the amount that would allow me to ever achieve “wealth”–that is a minimum of $5M in networth. The I joined a company with actual stock (not stock options) and it went up in value a lot. And my other stocks also went up. It showed me how in 4 years, I could increase my networth by $1M. From ~$500k in 2017 to ~$1.5M at the end fo this year. Now, that was a winning lotto ticket. But there’s also no reason to think, if I were a normal person, that I couldn’t keep moving up in my career and getting similar grants for the next 30 years of my career. They may not go up as much as this one did, but at some point I would hit the $5M goal. It doesn’t seem completely impossible–and I don’t even need my husband’s money to make it happen.
  • I can’t afford the mortgage. This is the other option. I know, these are two extremes– but I really see this being how my financial life plays out going forward. If I can figure out a career where I can every 4-5 years or so go to a new job and keep moving up, I should be ok. If I can continue to obtain mid-level/senior-level roles in large companies then I should be fine. But the other–very realistic potential–is that I let my mental health issues get the best of me–I stay at this job for a while longer, then move to a different role (in order to maintain the level of stock grant you have to switch companies usually) and then I bomb, and I spend the next many years working at low-paid startups with crazy CEOs who hire me to do the impossible as a one-woman shop because I can’t get another role at a public company again. I’ll burn out on that too, because I’m no longer in my 20s. So then I don’t know what happens. My one ask to my husband is if we buy a house, after our kids are in school (and he is no longer a part time SAHD), can he get a FT job (esp if this scenario plays out.) He seems open to it, but it’s hard not knowing what that looks like. It’s hard to commit to a very expensive 30 year mortgage when who the hell knows what will happen.

So why not rent?

I know, I know. Renting is a fine idea. We’ve looked at a few rentals. I’m the type of person who is mentally impacted by her living space. And the actual SPACE. I grew up in not only a reasonably large house with a big backyard, but also a large room. I tend to feel claustrophobic in small spaces. I understand if financially it’s the best thing to do, I can deal with tiny rooms. I can deal with a lot if we just don’t have the money to have a nicer life.

Then I look at my bank account. Between my husband and I, by the end of this year, we should be just shy of $2M, or perhaps quite shy of $2M if the markets keep dropping. I also watch as my total wealth drops $100k-$200k in a day or two, and at this point I don’t bat an eye (outside to check if I should tax loss harvest any dumb investments I’ve made before they drop further and rebalance into a better diversified portfolio.) I’ve trained myself to be ok about losing $200k in the stock market (on paper) yet I’m completely terrified of buying a $1.6M house and it being worth $1.4M after we live in it for a few years (I mean, I’m terrified of it being worth $800k after we live in it for a few years — but the stock market could also drop 50% in a few years and I’m not selling. So why NOT buy a house?)

I’ve also run the numbers. It appears with the limited tax write-offs, at some point it still makes sense to own. That $500k capital gains tax exclusion on homes helps a lot when you’re a high earner (which is dumb as I hate how most of the tax law benefits not only rich people more but people who consistently have high incomes, as it assumes if you make a lot one year you always will.) But–as a current high earner (which in CA means something different than the rest of the country, mind you) I feel like I have to take advantage of what’s left in the tax law that benefits higher earners, as long as it still exists.

Home Ownership Tax Benefits are Slim, But Still Exist

There’s Prop 13. For those of you who don’t know Prop 13, it basically locks your tax amount into the value of your home when you purchased it, plus inflation. I’m torn on how I feel about this law. On one hand, I think it’s necessary because it makes sure that people who buy homes that are affordable (to them at the time) don’t get priced out because suddenly a tech company moves in down the street and their house is worth a bazillion dollars, and their forever tax bill goes up so much they have to sell and move.

On the other hand, Prop 13 keeps people from moving when they should, making the housing inventory low. Worse, it also significantly reduces property tax, which means despite being a high tax state, public schools are chronically underfunded. It’s all pretty messed up.

Nonetheless, it is what it is. So, buying in my 30s and staying in that home for years can be quite fruitful, as long as Prop 13 stays intact. I would imagine they would probably have to grandfather current owners and phase it out over time, even if they realize it’s not sustainable — but who knows. In any case, it is the law now, which means even though we will have to be paying taxes forever, in 30 years we’d be paying taxes on a home “worth” $1.6M, even if the going market rate is $3M or more—even if our neighbors who just moved in are paying taxes on a $3M and we’re paying half what they’re paying. That makes retiring here possible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about old age lately–not because I’m old quite yet–but because I’m helping my 66 year old mother plan HER life. And that situation is a total cluster due to poor money management by my parents. My goal is to be wealthy to be able to help her out a bit (at least pay her back for college and my wedding, especially if she lives long enough to really need the money, which I hope she does.) BUT — for me, I think I want the option to stay in my home and have a live-in aide. Who the hell knows what I will want when I am 65/70/80 etc, but why not plan for that now? The worst that happens is I end up with way too much money to split between my kids and charity when I die. At the very least, that buys me options. Especially since my husband seems on the “I don’t want to think about retirement bandwagon” (I did convince him to set up a Solo 401k so we’re putting about $35k collective to that a year while we can to make up for many years of no retirement savings–but buying a house will def make that saving harder to do.)

Let’s Be Stupid and Buy a House in the Bay Area

Anyway, here we are, ready to do something maybe stupid. Maybe making the worse financial decision of my life. After looking at hundreds of houses all over the Bay Area, we’re ready to put our second offer in — and first one that’s actually AT list. I don’t know if that will get us anywhere, but I have a good feeling about this one. It’s not perfect at all, but I feel (somewhat) good about the compromises.

The major compromise is that it’s a 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath that we will be sharing with my father-in-law for TBD years. FIL will pay $2k a month towards our mortgage and help with watching our son while we work. It isn’t full time childcare coverage, but it’s still a huge help. And my husband and I both feel strongly about keeping our kids out of daycare during the whole COVID mess for many reasons.

Our initial goal was to find a 3/2 with a separate living unit. We’ve looked at all sorts of places–homes with weird in-laws, detached ADUs were the ADU was modern and beautiful and the main house was decrepit, 5 bedroom houses with a downstairs master that was beautiful that could maybe work and 4 upstairs “bedrooms” that were barely bigger than my pinky, on lots with no real private outdoor space.

The conclusion I came to — in my semi logical state of thinking right now in a complete blur as a pregnant woman who has seen a thousand too many houses so far — is we must compromise to make it work here and not totally kill us financially.

I had to throw most of the “how much can you afford” rules at the window. Few people have $1M in taxable stocks at my age also. I can’t rely on the $1M in stocks because that could drop to half that or less, but it’s a different kind of cushion. I’m not selling right now because our capital gains tax in CA is so high — but if we hit a rough patch and need to sell stock, even if it’s gone down a bit, we’ll likely have a lower earning year and have lower cap gains tax. So it’s worth it to leave the stock and not put it into a larger down payment after losing 40% of it or so by selling it all, and let it ride and have it as a safety net.

Where I want to be is at 28% or less of our pre-tax income, before bonus and RSU. I wanted to do this after-tax, but if we did that the math shows we can afford to stay in our current 1br. I decided I need to be slightly less risk-averse here. The 2-3x salary rule doesn’t work. It tells use we can buy a $750k house. That doesn’t exist here. And that doesn’t take into account bonus or RSU which I prefer to ignore for planning purposes, but still doesn’t tell the whole story.

My banker said 32% is the DTI rule he prefers. I’m aiming for 28%.

I am assuming I can make $175k a year going forward, or my husband can eventually get a full time job and make up the difference (ie if I earn $150k, he can make $25k more, which is very realistic if he got a full time job.)

His income is a lot more consistent than mine is actually — so I’m locking him in at $90k a year. I feel good that even if he has to change jobs and get a FT entry level job in a tech company (which I think he could do), he could make at least $90k.

  • That gets us to $265k a year, or $22k a month, give or take.
  • 28% of that is about $6k a month.
  • I feel pretty good about $6k a month going to our housing costs.
  • I feel better about $5k a month going to housing costs.
  • If we do my banker’s 32%, that gets us to $7k a month. I don’t like $7k a month, but I’m ok with it knowing that we probably will earn MORE than the total comp I’m including in this plan (my last two startup jobs my base was in this range and that was years ago)

So $6k a month is our target, $7k is our stretch, $5k is our happy place.

Even though my FIL’s contribution won’t go on forever (esp if we buy a home with only 3 bedrooms), it will definitely help up front when our income is likely the lowest as inflation hasn’t kicked in to increase our income while our mortgage stays flat.

In terms of rentals, we can definitely do better short term. At the moment, WFH, we can move far into the south or east bay and get a house for $4500 – $5000 a month rent with more rooms and space. That is a thought as well.

But the tax savings on the interest for the first few years seems to equate to about $1k a month between federal and state taxes. Maybe less than that. But it’s significant enough that it makes up enough of the difference between a $5k rental and $6k home.

So $6k a month it is. That’s a scary number, since we’re paying $2500 a month in rent right now for our 1 bedroom. But if I’m ever going to feel ready for it, I feel ready for it now.

  • $1.6M home = $7000 PITI
  • $1.65M home = $7250 PITI
  • $1.7M home = $7500 PITI

Based on the above figures, $1.6M should be our absolute max, with my FIL. Unfortunately — anything worth buying here (that also works with my FIL) in the area we want to live is at least that.

Buying a Home and Compromises We’re Willing to Make

Here’s what I’ve decided are non compromises:

  • Under 1 hour drive to work: (I wanted 30 minutes, I gave up — hoping WFH is something I can maintain going forward, or eventually I get a job closer to the home we buy )
  • Larger lot (7500-10000 sq ft): Lot size is interesting here. You see $3M homes on 5000 sq ft lots. Some people don’t want large lots because they aren’t outside much in their own private spaces and don’t want to deal with maintaining a yard.  I get that — growing up on the east coast a yard was expensive to maintain, but it rained so the watering bit was usually covered, with the addition of occasional sprinklers. Still, a 5000-6000 sq ft lot seems limiting. We do (/would) spend a lot of time outside in our private space. A larger lot also means we have room to build onto the house should we ever have more money and want to make it bigger without going “up.”
  • A “vacation” in my house: Decent sized master bedroom suite with existing bath. This is definitely a luxury item. But my mental health is improved by privacy, space, and access to a soaking tub. If I’m going to be “house poor” I at least want to have a space at home that feels like the vacation I won’t be able to afford because I bought a house.
  • Nice street/neighborhood. We’re homebodies. On a good day, we make it to the neighborhood park, or a restaurant around the corner. There are a few neighborhoods I like, and I’ve decided it makes sense to focus our home search there.
  • Decent schools. School rankings don’t tell the whole story (they just tell you if non-native speakers go to the school), but I still find it concerning when non-native speakers are averaging a 2 on their state tests. So I’ve made the cutoff a 5 for school rankings in the area. My kids will be going to those schools. Not only do I not believe in private school, when we buy a house here we won’t be able to afford private school! Also, resale value is also impacted by the school ranking… so buying in an area with “better” schools helps later if we decide this house isn’t right for us and we want to move, or we want to move in retirement, or whenever we decide it is time to move on.
  • Enough Space Inside (1750+ sq ft): Can we live a perfectly happy live in a cozy 1300 sq ft house? Of course. But I don’t see the point in buying something so small– for us. We don’t need 2500 sq ft either. I’ve come the conclusion that 1750-2000 sq ft is perfect, especially with the plans to live with my father-in-law. It basically ends up being that we are living in about 1300-1500 square feet for a few years, and FIL gets 200-400 sq ft. But long term, FIL will move out, and we’ll have more space. That’s important to me as we’ll have at least 2 kids and possibly a third, if the stars align.
  • Family Room AND Living Room: having two main living areas is important to me. It’s a luxury, not a necessity. And it’s rather rare here. But with 2+ kids, having two living areas will be nice when my kids have friends over, and we want to be not all in the same space. Plus, having the extra room gives us flexibility long term (we can convert a family room to a bedroom if needed, instead of having to add on.)
  • Garage: we just need a place to store things (I’m tired of having my bike in the living room) and a spot to put a treadmill for my husband etc.
  • Nice to have — Laundry Room — this is a rarity here, but with 2+ kids, I want a laundry room (not laundry in the garage, or in the bathroom, etc)
  • Nice to have — 4+ bedrooms: This was a must have until I realized I really like big rooms and in a 1750-1900 square foot house with a good master bedroom, bigger master bath, and all of the above, a 4th bedroom is hard to find.
  • General good flow: some houses here… a lot of them… have very strange additions, poorly designed and unpermitted.

The house we are bidding on meets most of the requirement below.

  • $1.6M list
  • 1900 sq ft
  • 9000 sq ft lot
  • family room + living room
  • laundry room
  • giant master bedroom suite (they actually converted an existing bedroom into a bathroom, so you can imagine how giant it is. It’s a bit too big, but I can see long term changing the layout a bit and turning part of it into a home office
  • good neighborhood/street (close to restaurants and park)

What isn’t perfect about it?

  • It’s listed at $1.6M, they prob want $1.7M. I’m not sure they can get $1.7M — the neighborhood seems to go more $1.5-$1.6. A few houses are actually sitting for various reasons. That said, this house does have an oversized lot (for the area) so if anyone else has been waiting to snag a bigger lot in that general area, we may lose the house, or have to pay more for it. We are doing a preemptive offer before offers are due — which makes it hard to know if we’re over paying if they do accept the offer. What we have going for us is down the street there is a 2000 sq ft 5br/3ba listed at $1.7M that has been sitting. It’s a flip, and while it looks nice it was a poor flip job if you pay attention to the actual work done (they did it in a month — bought $1.25M and now it’s $1.7M!) But because that is sitting, I’m hoping a 3br/2ba house can go for $1.6M.
  • It has one giant master bedroom… and 2 teeny tiny bedrooms. That kind of sucks. It sucks most because our FIL will take the master bedroom for a few years, and we’ll be relegated to the two smaller bedrooms. BUT at least there’s the two living spaces. We’ve discussed putting our bed in the family room (it would be kind of like a studio apartment situation since it’s open to the kitchen and garage) and we’d put my son in one of the small rooms and my husband’s office (and possibly a guest bed–that I might occasionally sleep in) in the other small bedroom. Our baby would sleep in our room until s/he turns 1, and then baby either goes into my son’s room (they can share for a while) or my husband moves his office into the family room and we put baby in the other small bedroom. … … eventually, his dad moves out (it’s complicated but the plan is when my mother in law needs to move out of her house — which is owned by her 96 year old mother — she will buy a 3/2 near us, and my FIL will move in with her — they unmarried but friends) and we’ll get the master bedroom, my husband can probably put his office in the family room, or in the master bedroom (though I prefer he doesn’t have it in there, but there’s room if we need to make it work.)
  • While the lot is 9000 sq ft, it doesn’t actually look that large to me. I think that’s because it’s a wider yard and the houses next to it are 2 floors, so there isn’t a lot of privacy. I think we can add a little privacy, but we won’t be able to grow a tree big enough to block the neighbor from seeing into our yard. Which isn’t that big of a a deal, I just like having privacy and feeling like I’m in my own secluded little park. We can probably make it better, and at least there’s room for a swing set.

We probably won’t get this house. But we might. I’m trying to decide if it’s worth going up to $1.7M for it. If we can get it at $1.6M, I will feel good about the purchase. In the town we prefer to be in, we’ve decided not to bid on houses that have gone $1.7M. They weren’t as big or nice as this one, but if we have to pay $1.7M for a house 30 min further from my work, I start wondering if we should just go $1.8M to get something that works in the better area. But, no, I’ve run the numbers, and we really shouldn’t do more than $1.6. If we do $1.7 it’s over budget, but we can make it work.

So, what do you think we should do?