Buying a House CAN be a Money Mistake

We have made a lot of money mistakes over the last 30 years of marriage. I hope by writing this that I can keep somebody from making the same mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but the most important thing is to learn from them. My husband and I have very different family experiences growing up, but neither of us were taught how to handle money. I was in college when we got married so I only worked part-time and my husband worked in a warehouse so he didn’t make a lot of money. We lived in a small 1 bedroom apartment when we first got married, but moved to a 2 bedroom house before our first anniversary. Our apartment had all expenses included in the rent – cable and utilities – so we knew exactly what was due each month. The house rent was less, but didn’t include cable or utilities, so it ended up being higher and varied from month to month.

I don’t really think moving into the house was a mistake, because it was a good deal and served us well for about 8 years. The mistake we made was deciding to buy the house after we lived there a few years. When we decide to move, we thought we would be able to dress it up and sell it and make some money. We painted the house and fixed it up and it was really cute, but it didn’t sell. It was not in a good location, so it didn’t matter how cute it was, no one wanted it at our selling price. We lowered the price but it still didn’t sell. The people that wanted to live there couldn’t afford to buy a house and the people that could afford to buy a house, didn’t want to live there.

We then decided to rent it out until it sold so that we could go ahead and move, this was a horrible experience. We had a few good renters over the years, but overall they were terrible. Either they didn’t pay the rent or destroyed the house. One time it was so bad that my husband had to shovel the trash out and he cut the carpet at the edges and dragged it to the curb. We had to replace all the flooring, repaint the walls and cleaned for days, it was nasty and there were cockroaches everywhere. That was the worst renter but there were others that caused lots of problems.

Even if the house wasn’t rented out or the renter didn’t pay the rent, we still had to pay the payment. It took a long time to evict a renter after they stopped paying rent. Some would just move but we had to file eviction papers at least twice and that costs extra money and takes time. We eventually found someone to take over the payments and we got out from under that house.

A lot of people make money buying and flipping houses, but it didn’t work for us. A lot of people make money renting out houses or apartments, but it did not work that way for us. We probably ended up spending more money on that house than we received overall. Buying that house ended up being a bad money mistake for us. It took us several years to get out from under that mistake. If I had known how it would turn out, I would never have purchased that house.

I have learned a lot about how to use our money wisely since then, check out Not Cheap, Just Frugal and What’s the Deal at Aldi?

Have you made bad money mistakes? How did yours turn out? Leave a comment and let me know.

Sign up below to join my newsletter so you always know what is going on around here and don’t miss anything important!