House on the Hill

Remember this house. Well...

We moved.  We left what was supposed to be our forever home, and moved into the basement of a family member for roughly six months. And now we have moved again, into a small ranch house that sits up on a hill that we are renting. Why you may ask? To put it plainly: Money. Owning a house is expensive. Whenever anything breaks, you have to dig into your pockets for the money to fix it, or do without. Not to mention all the other costs that go with homeownership, like property taxes, utilities, home owner's insurance, HOA fees, and so many others.

Add on the cost of raising two adorable children, student loans, and wanting to experience life instead of just surviving, and you have the perfect storm of debt and struggle.  It was all beginning to be too much. So Mikey and I sat down and talked and talked. We actually had several conversations about it. We realized that we didn't want to live life surviving paycheck to paycheck. We didn't want to have to worry about the next catastrophe and not know where we would get the money from to cover what we needed to cover. We didn't want to worry that one of us would lose our job, and we wouldn't have a paycheck to cover our expenses.

So we made the decision to downsize, get our debt under control, and build a substantial nest egg before we put ourselves into more debt buying a new forever home.  For now, the house on the hill is our home.

What does downsizing look like for us? We went from a two story, five bedrooms, four bathrooms house sitting on more than two acres, to a single story three bedrooms and two bathrooms with a reasonably sized lot. That sounds so major just typing it. The front porch is to die for! The master bedroom is spacious, even if the closet space is going to feel tiny coming from each of us having our own individual walk-in closets. The kids have asked to share a room, and that will leave the third bedroom to serve as a guest room and office. The backyard is nicely laid out with lots of space for the kids to play, and it's fenced in. There's a laundry room and storage in the garage. I'm optimistic that this house will work well for us.  Of course my Pinterest boards are jumping with ideas to make the loss in space more manageable.