My House

In my youth, I read a lot of real estate books and shelter magazines. "Shelter magazines" is the umbrella term for anything housing related, like kitchen and bath magazines, decorating magazines, floor plan magazines, house and garden magazines, etc.

Some of what I read about real estate is out of date and no longer applicable. At one time, one neat get rich quick real estate trick was taking over a VA mortgage but the rules eventually changed and that basically no longer applies.

And my mother was officially "the maid" and unofficially a lot more than just the maid for a couple who owned a bunch of apartment complexes. At one time, my mother defacto took over running one of their unprofitable, dive complexes without really being paid for it or acknowledged as being in charge.

I think the manager quit and they asked my mother to make a list of stuff that needed to happen, maintenance wise, and she made a very thorough list to which they replied hysterically "We can't afford that!!"

She kept running notes and would buy replacement stuff as she tripped across it on sale while running other errands. They weren't really adequately compensating her for her labor. They paid her for her time "being the maid" at their house but assumed she could just pick up stuff for them anytime she went shopping for herself and they would pay for the items she bought but not her time shopping.

My mother was extremely honest and I know a lot of people respond to corrupt, abusive bullshit like that by turning corrupt themselves. She didn't do that but she did look for coupons and charged them full price for the items and pocketed any coupon savings as her cut for her labor.

So they never did hire a new manager and with my mother defacto running that complex very part-time, it finally became profitable. My mother also did a lot of painting, wallpapering etc. at home.

So I just knew a LOT about real estate for a twenty-something homemaker and when we returned from Germany, I stayed with relatives in Georgia while my husband went ahead to our next duty station in Kansas and found us a rental. 

He rented a trailer and initially was bragging to me about what a great DEAL it was and changed his tune to "Babe, you gotta understand! There was NOTHING else available!" after I woke up with a locust in my hair and began screaming at him.

He went to Master Gunner school while we resided in this awful little trailer that my oldest son nicknamed "The bug house." Master Gunner school was at Fort Benning, "Home of the Infantry," AKA the military base where my dad retired that sits cheek to jowl with my hometown of Columbus, Georgia. 

So I decided to go visit my parents for "a couple of weeks" to get the hell out of this God forsaken trailer and ended up staying six weeks because my parents were anachronisms who related differently to time and schedules than most people. It wasn't the only time I went home to visit and stayed longer than I originally planned.

We only had one car and my husband had gone to school with someone else. I returned to the trailer two or three days before him.

So he comes home on June 17th I think and we go get our mail at the post office and my husband tells me "I'm getting promoted on July 1st." To which I replied "We're MOVING."

So we pick the kids up from daycare and go to a pizza place because the kitchen in the trailer is practically unusable and we rarely tried to cook, which meant the low rent dive wasn't as cheap as it seemed based on the rent. It's like 3pm or something and the place is DEAD and I've got a newspaper I want to peruse, so I give my five year old a bunch of quarters and send him to play a video game while his brother watches to get them out my hair.

I'm looking at the classifieds for three bedroom apartments and I notice a couple of homes for sale and I realize we need like $700 a month rent for an apartment but interest is at a 25-year low and I can potentially get a small house for less than that.

And I say "We're buying a house." To which the husband replies something like "Are you NUTS? We CAN'T buy a house! We have no savings!"

I casually dismissed that with "You don't need savings. You're in the Army."  The next few days were grumpy and I think he soon understood without me saying it that he was buying me a house if he wanted to stay married. 

If I was going to be trailer trash, I could do that as a welfare mom. I didn't need to put up with his shit to be poverty stricken. I could do that all on my own without having to put up with him, so he was going to provide me a middle class life in accordance with what his dream career was capable of supporting or I was done.

We were living on one income and there wasn't much in our price range. We looked at six houses in about a week of house hunting and made an offer on a three bedroom, one bath fixer with a good floor plan.

He really didn't want to make an offer on the house because when we went to open the front door, the doorknob came off in his hand and he was HORRIFIED. I only remember that detail because he talked about it several months after we bought the house. 

As Ms. Real Estate Books and Shelter Magazines, that minor detail made NO impression on ME. I had other priorities.

So he's HORRIFIED that I want this house and he's the guy with the income, so the real estate agent asks HIM if he's sure he wants to make an offer and in an extremely defeated tone he tells her to do whatever I want. And I want to make an offer.

It's the only three bedroom house in our price range with a good floorplan. I was willing to buy a two bedroom house because I was buying a house one way or another, but I knew three bedroom houses have much better resale value.

So I have no savings and it's a fixer that's been on the market a while and it's a motivated seller. I tell the real estate agent to ask them to cover closing costs and she suggests "They can cover paint for the exterior and you supply the labor." because it desperately needs paint.

So they counter offer that they will cover all that but add those expenses to the price of the house. I so don't care and I'm happy to agree to that. It's a cash flow issue for me and even bumping up the price a thousand or so dollars still makes this cheaper per month than a three bedroom apartment.

So our initial house payment was something like $510 versus potentially $700 in rent for a three bedroom apartment and we were a short walk to an excellent award winning elementary school. This ended up being the best years of my life and "getting back to Kansas" is still a metaphorical goal for me, though I don't literally want to move back to the state of Kansas which has plants that make me very ill.

We refinanced the house in the short time we lived there. This meant we SKIPPED making a house payment at all one month and then our payments were lower thereafter. It was December 1st that we didn't have a house payment, so we had a big Christmas that year.

My husband was good at his job and soon had orders for recruiting duty, which is a special assignment not everyone qualifies for. We really loved Kansas and he tried to fight it because we wanted to stay there but he was told after multiple appeals "needs of the Army."

So he tells me "The only other option is pleading financial hardship because we bought a house here." To which I replied "You are NOT telling the army you aren't competent to manage your finances, no."

We hadn't owned the house long enough to sell it without taking a bath. I looked into that.

We ended up renting it out for a few years until it had gone up in value and made more sense to sell. It was being rented out for not much more than the mortgage, but I was keeping the difference in a bank account to cover maintenance expenses, which I think included replacing the hot water heater.

While renting it out, Federal escrow laws changed and the bank had to cut us a check for like $500. I bought a new printer and software for the computer.

I sat down once and added up the one month free rent because we refinanced and the escrow refund and the difference in mortgage versus renting etc etc and concluded we made at least $7000 off that house in the years we owned it AND miraculously a substantial portion of that benefited us WHILE we owned it 

Buying houses to rent out typically isn't very profitable. The pay off is when you eventually sell the house after paying down the mortgage. You typically make little or nothing initially and may even be losing money on maintenance costs.

Being a landlord is a "buy and hold" strategy. And it takes years to establish equity because mortgages are front loaded and MOST of the payment is interest for the first few years.

I kept wishing I could figure out how to somehow parlay that into serious money and leave the husband but I would have needed to own multiple houses to do that and had no means to get there.