Old house, new house, and steps towards mortgage-free

Living a life without debt has always been such an attractive life to me, and something my husband and I have been committed to achieving since we first got married. Our ideas have changed about it over time, but since getting married we have paid off many tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and paid off two cars. We had genuinely hoped to avoid a mortgage, confidently stating that we would rent as long as we had to.

Those plans changed for us when Victoria was a baby. The city we live in is really booming, and rental and real estate prices have been going up and up. While we could rent a small apartment for $700 when we first got married, by the time we had Victoria, our not-so-great 2 bedroom apartment cost about $1300 per month and was going up in rent significantly every year. 

I wrote about this a while back, but essentially we ended up coming to the conclusion that buying a home with a mortgage and a solid down payment was going to be our best move (and actually cost us less than our rental). We chose a house that was well below the top end of what our bank said we could get, and began looking at is as an investment to get mortgage free. 

Since doing this we have taken Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University at our church. It has lit a fire under us and given us a practical and solid path to being fully debt free (mortgage and all). It also has given us a plan for setting up our children for a future without debt. 

We decided that our first home, which was in a prime location, but was definitely the scruffy house on the block due to having been a rental home for several years, was going to be an investment home. We had the twins and knew it was a little too small bedroom-wise for what we needed in the long run.  

Our first home when we bought it. The shutters were so
faded! They were originally dark blue like around the front door

I spent hours pouring over articles about what changes to a home bring the biggest bang for their buck, tracking real estate listings for similar homes and looking at what other people did with them, and making plans for our home. 

We put a plan together and budgeted $15,000 to put into the home and made a list of the projects we would do. 

By the time we had lived there for 2.5 years, it was ready to go on the market and we began looking for another house. We chose to move a little further out, closer to where my husband works. Houses are cheaper there and taxes are much lower. We found this home our first week of looking and knew it was just right for us. It was just a few hundred square feet bigger, but it had the “guts” (read: closet space) I was looking for, and my husband’s commute went from 40minutes to 12minutes. 

Our new home, which we have now lived in for almost a year, is in a quieter neighborhood. Although it isn't much bigger, the layout is a bit more little-kid friendly, and we (I) enjoy the large closets!

Not only that, our new home was going to cost less than our old home was (hopefully) going to sell for, bringing our mortgage down significantly. All part of the plan of getting mortgage free! 

So our old home went on the market at a price I couldn’t believe we were asking, and it sold 7 hours later with 2 offers. It was such an amazing moment when we saw all of our hard work come to fruition! We were able to walk away from that home with a large profit and put that down on the next home, and all it took was a little elbow grease 

Our old home got a facelift before we sold it, including new shutters

I’ll be sharing in coming posts what we did to make such a difference in this home with little (or no) skill or experience on our parts. Yes, we made some mistakes, and yes, we had several “lessons learned” moments, but in the end we walked out of that home reluctantly (because it was finally so much more beautiful!) but also excitedly and feeling accomplished as we took that chunk of money and put it into the next house. 

Have any of you done work on a home? Or if you haven’t, have you ever wanted to?

More details to come!