Ed and I are officially trying to buy a place. Believe it or not, we’ve given this a lot of thought – we’re tired of Aquaman and his never-ending crime spree, tired of our car being hit by Admiral Ackbar, tired of our neighbours (especially those jerks in #5). We seriously looked into moving elsewhere and continuing to rent, but the idea didn’t really appeal to us – we’d have to almost double the amount of rent we pay currently, and for what? At the end of the day, you’ve really got nothing.
Neither of us had given much thought to owning property before. We thought it was the unattainable dream; something fancy people did but certainly not happy little nerds like us. We honestly thought that we’d be cool with renting forever – it was cheap, we could live with the minor inconveniences, Drunk Bettie is always hilarious, and having Josh and Shan downstairs was all kinds of awesome.
Then all at once, our friends decided renting was lame and also that they hate living near us.
It seemed to happen in an instant, but over the course of a weekend all our friends had meetings and brokers and agreements and approvals for mortgages. This made Ed and I pause – if they could get a mortgage, couldn’t we? After all, we make similar amounts of chickens and we don’t have much debt. Rates are low, all the signage says – I don’t know what that means, but maybe we should look into this some more.
So, we did. We met with a sexy mortgage broker whom I have seen without pants, and he crunched some numbers but good. End result: Ed and I qualify for a hilariously high mortgage and now we can go out and buy a house (or a condo/townhouse, which is what we’re looking for – fuck lawns). Hooray!
Except now we need to come up with a down payment, and it somehow turned into a never-ending lecture about sacrifice and responsibility and how we are total failures as adults (which, duh, have you met me?) and I am so tired of it all I’m thinking about living in the car out of spite.
We don’t have $20,000 in twonies in my puggy bank. I know, I know – total failure as an adult – but it’s true. We DO have the money tucked away in RRSPs, though. Awesome! Let’s get started!
Yeah, because things are totally that easy for us.
For reasons we can’t quite track down, the RRSP is of the Locked-In variety and we can’t touch it until we retire. Sure, when we hit 55 and if we have a valid reason, we can take out SOME of it – but the rest stays put until you are 65. The only exception is made for people with terminal illnesses and/or if you are literally starving and going to be out on the street within 24 hours unless you can find some cash, neither of which apply to us. So, we’re boned. Boned!
We’re looking at other solutions, including the time-honoured act of begging mommy and daddy for a loan. I steeled myself with a shot of Drano and called my mother, which went about as well as can be expected – I am a horrible child and the reason that cancer exists and no one will ever love me and I am a complete and utter failure as a human being and .. she’ll think about it. Ed asked his parents, which went a little better (although not without some agonizing discussions about our frivolous lifestyle) – but at the moment, we’re in limbo. We’re throwing all our extra cash into a Down Payment Fund and cutting back on as much as we can, but bills still need to be paid and we still need to eat. There isn’t really a hell of a lot we can cut out of our budget – regardless of what our parents think, we don’t actually live that extravagant a life. I’ve already cut back on my video games almost 90% from last year, we don’t drink, we buy our whores in Family Packs at Costco, I rarely buy new vehicles on a whim – what more can we do? Okay, we’ll eat out less. I’ll buy Mystery Meat instead of Grade A Beef. No more Sephora sprees, and it wouldn’t kill me to limit my champagne baths to once a month instead of weekly. All of these are good decisions, but none of it will help us get to $20K before the HST hits.
Normally there would be no sense of urgency about this, but there is. We’ve been in this situation once before, where we were thinking about buying – but at the time, $175000 for a townhouse seemed outrageous, and also I hated Calgary. A very short time later, that $175K property was selling for $380K – oops. There are four things driving us to buy sooner rather than later:
- Rates are really stinkin’ low and they can’t get much lower
- The Olympics could create a housing boom and we’d price ourselves out of the market
- The upcoming HST will increase the price of a new home by thousands
- If I have to pay to replace our car windows one more time I am going to snap and cut a bitch
I’m really stressed out about all of this, and we’re not even beyond the “curiously looking” stage. I’m also tired of hearing about sacrifice – it’s all about giving things up and forcing hardship upon yourselves to feel as though you’ve truly earned it, apparently. Except .. no one is looking at this through MY eyes. Sacrifice isn’t always giving up material goods or self-flagellation – in order for this whole “buying a house” thing to work, I have to give up something much more important to me:
*dramatic pause*
I am giving up MY FREEDOM.
I mean it. If I sign all the papers and commit to paying off a mortgage, I will officially no longer be allowed to run away. Even when things are going awesome with Ed (as they are now), I still harbor a secret desire to run away to exotic locations and see what lies over that hill. If we buy a place, I will be more married than ever before. I don’t see it as being “stuck”, since it’s something I want – but I certainly won’t be able to flee when the fancy strikes. As silly as it sounds, this is really important to me. I won’t be able to run away, and that’s the biggest sacrifice I can think of – but it doesn’t count, because it’s not a tangible thing.
Seriously though, how much do we suck for not having $20K sitting around? We are pathetic.
Building myself a fort out of couch cushions never sounded so good.
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