How Becoming a Homeowner Has Changed Me

What Owning a House Has Cost Me

Mark Brown

March 14, 2023

My house is my best and biggest financial asset. That’s going to be true for a long time. I can’t dispute that statement in any way. Owning a house costs more than just dollars and cents over the years. It also just about dollars and cents because everything I, or anyone, wants to do requires money. Owning my house has effected my general outlook on life, priorities, and what I value. I can trace most of what I feel on a daily basis to buying a house in July 2016. This is essay is going to be primarily about my experiences owning a house. I’d rather write that than one giving a traditional list of advice for prospective buyers. It is important to pass on lessons from my experience owning and purchasing a house to prospective buyers so I won’t shy away from it. The second part of this essay will dive into specific lessons and thoughts on this issue. Owning a house has been a largely positive experience, but it has removed the possibility of other life experiences along the way.

I bought my house in Des Moines, Iowa in July 2016. It is the only one so far and all I need right now. What has made owning a house particularly challenging over the last almost 7 years is the fact that I am single and have been for the entirely of my time here. I make enough to keep a roof over my head but not enough to really get ahead financially. That means home improvements, vacations, developing hobbies or essential life skills, activities, etc all are made more difficult. The truth that no one can fight is that everything has a cost. Most of that is monetary. If I don’t have the funds to do something, it doesn’t happen. No amount of desiring to do something will help me accomplish it. This is where being a single homeowner with no roommates really becomes difficult. I wouldn’t trade it for any of the alternatives but the house can act like a noose around other potential life experiences and hobbies. Waking up in my bedroom is a daily reminder that choices have to be made will have a positive effect on some things and negative on others. It really affirms my “circumstances create situations that require decisions to be made that starts to cycle all over again” belief statement I have made before in previous essays. Having another person in the household to pay mortgage and the other bills living in a house one owns would be extremely valuable. It is the difference between getting what I want without having to give everything else up and getting some of the “everything else.” That said, I’m not particularly looking for a roommate or a significant other at this time. I wouldn’t be averse to it, but I spend the vast majority of my non-work hours doing strength training or golfing. It would be unfair to my significant other if they weren’t in that headspace because I either wouldn’t be around or I’d be sleeping.

I wouldn’t discourage any perspective buyer out there who is single with no intention of having a roommate because it is a worthwhile investment for the most part. Some properties are indeed money pits, but there are lots of factors in play there. One of the biggest lessons from owning my home is just how difficult saving money is. The reality is it has to be done. I am far better at spending money than saving it. I save in an automated kind of way. Money goes from my checking account to my savings account automatically every 2 weeks when I get paid. The 401k gets taken right out of my check before I even get to see it. It can disheartening to think that all of that money being saved is likely to be dusted in one shot. All of that effort to building up enough money to maybe do something fun like a destination vacation gets destroyed by something expensive in the house needing replaced. But hey, it got fixed, right? That feeling fucking blows. I don’t even have kids or a significant other to disappoint with that kind of news. It’s just me. I can’t imagine how bad or humiliated I would feel if I had to explain to someone I cared about that a busted compressor on my air conditioner prevented or delayed a trip. As a result, owning a home has really helped drive the value of the everyday grind over everything else. That has been heightened over the last couple years. My daily routine over the last couple years can be summed up like this: sleep, work, lift, eat, repeat. Maybe golf on the weekend. That’s not just a weekday thing either. The grind is who I am at this point, for better or worse. That stemmed from needing to not only maintain the roof over my head but also get ahead for when stuff breaks.

Covid-19 and the events that subsequently occurred didn’t effect me much because I was so, so focused on the daily grind. It is part of why I adopted strength training as my lead hobby. I can legitimately thank Covid-19 happening and the public response to it for focusing my effort into strength training. Everyone who takes it seriously knows that lifting is a mostly lonely experience. There’s going to be days and/or weeks where the training partner isn’t going to be able to lift with them. The drive to get stronger, more powerful or muscular has to come from within. The reason I can thank Covid-19 is because the response from the world caused a boom in the company I work for. Those 12-14 hour days in 2020 put so much money in my pocket that I was able to complete, more or less, the expensive side project everyone can see on the home page of this blog. Obviously, not all of the equipment in that picture is mine, but a fair amount of it is. I wrote about how expensive building a home gym can be in January. It wouldn’t have been possible without everyone freaking out and causing 65-70 hour work weeks. Did those days suck in the moment? Yes, but it was ultimately worth it because I was able to get what I wanted done. The reason why I mention this specifically is because I consciously made the choice to focus effort on strength training for the purpose of getting stronger based on the fact it is currently about the only activity that I can do full tilt for free, or close to it. Anything else that requires assistance from stuff isn’t. It’s a blessing and a curse, just like everything else in life. Nothing is ever only positive or negative.

I have laid out the effect of taking strength training up as a serious hobby in lots of previous essays but I will summarize it here for new readers on the blog and because it bears repeating. It teaches the value of planning over spontaneity, discipline over motivation, aggressiveness over passiveness, the daily grind, and the daily sacrifices made today for a better tomorrow. I could continue but I will stop there. All of that I have applied to being a homeowner. I know I need to have enough money in the checking account for the mortgage payment at the beginning of the month. Other big bills hit in the middle of the month. Saving of the the liquid disposable income for future home-related disasters is a requirement. It all requires having a plan and executing the plan. That places activities, hobbies, food, and all the other everyday life things potentially on the chopping block. The phrase “eating ramen every day” to save enough money to be able to stop renting an apartment so one can get enough for a down payment on a house is very easy to understand. I could do the same concept to get ahead of housing projects that need done, my roof for example, but I’m not there yet. I have changed some daily habits to help that direction. Turning to strength training has helped build a lifestyle structure that helps deal with the downtime after work that could lead to spending money on stuff I don’t need. The requirements of training requires both effort and recovery. The blog also helps because I have to focus energy into writing essays like this. Becoming a homeowner shows the value of being able to get most out of the activities I choose to do.

A major effect of the planning that goes into owning a house is how the monetary cost of everything involved with life becomes highlighted. I have become far more aware of the cost of what I enjoy doing. Hobbies have a way of blinding the monetary cost of doing things we love to do. The enjoyment of the moment has a way of taking us out of our analytical mind so we can be present. Owning the house has brought the needs of monetary planning to the forefront of my decisioning making process. It has tamped down to the enjoyment of activities and hobbies. It’s not a negative, it’s just reality. Becoming hyperaware of the cost of the elements of a hobby is just part of diving deeper into it. It’s just going to happen whether someone wants it to happen or not. Let me provide some examples. Cooking is a hobby that has a very specific benefit for the homeowner. The ability to prepare my own meals allows me to keep food cost where I want them to be. That means I am able to move from the cheapest of meals to ones that emphasize the enjoyment of the food itself. There are certain ingredients I won’t buy unless I am making something specific because they are too expensive to just keep around and cook with on a daily basis. Heavy cream, non-green colored bell peppers, and seafood are just a few examples of this. I built my pan set before I moved into my house, more or less, but I am very aware of the state of my pans and their cost to replace. I don’t know if I would have had the resources to put my full weight into building the pan and knife set I have if it weren’t already done when I moved in.

The main thing I have experienced over the years owning my house is how it has effected what I value. That has leached into my personality somewhat. I don’t care much about spontaneous developments much anymore. I’m fairly certain I could tell anyone what I am doing on any given day of the year. Maybe even next year as well. I haven’t given any legitimate thought to a destination vacation since I moved into the house. Each day blends into the next. I barely recognize my birthday and holidays anymore. The former I don’t care about and the latter annoy me more than anything else, though that has to do with the way they effect the work schedule. I don’t own a Christmas tree, and I was raised Roman Catholic. To be brutally honest, I haven’t bought a real gift for anyone in years. That is because my monetary margins are very small, especially since my car insurance bill has come due in December. My desire to work is ruthlessly high. My mental capacity to get over any potential feelings of being overworked at my job grows by the day. I understand it is a dangerous line to cross to caring so little about my emotional well-being when it comes to work needing done. None of it matters. It really does come back to doing whatever it takes to maintain the roof over my head and attempting to save enough for when something breaks. There really is a lot of stress that goes owning a house. It’s baked into every day the way flour is a cake. If it sounds like I value making money over emotional well-being, that’s because I do. I’m not greedy. It’s just meeting life head on where it stands.

The place where the overall shift in my disposition and sense of value comes out the most is my work ethic and capacity to work. The easiest decisions I make in my day are going to work and going to lift, whether that’s in the my friend’s garage or at the Merle Hay location of Genesis Health Clubs. I don’t even think about either of those things. They are just realities of my day. Working towards a goal is how stuff gets done. At work, it’s about getting everything done that needs doing. I agreed to the do it by seeking employment there. I am more than willing to live up to my end of the bargain. The hardest thing to do is to tell me to take a break or stop. The little “thank yous” are now meaningless to me because they don’t contribute to the work being done or my paycheck. I just want to keep working. In the garage or gym, progress doesn’t come without serious focus on planning, effort, learning, recovery, etc. Work is all there is. Down time is planned because recovery is necessary and rest is the only way to achieve it. Nutrition has to be a main priority when seeking progress in strength training. “Eating ramen everyday” may help get someone a house, but it won’t help anyone trying to get stronger. Food, as a result of focusing effort on strength and muscular development, becomes a big chunk of the daily life budget. I know how much I spent on gym equipment over 2020-21. It’s quite a lot. Owning the house has been a major agent of change towards my desire to just work. I really do care very little about how hard I have to go to get done what needs doing. I would be remiss if I didn’t say the isolation of living alone for almost 7 years didn’t have anything to do with it as well. From when I moved into the house to March 2020 was just practice for the rest of what happened that year and 2021.

I don’t regret buying a house by any stretch of the imagination. Owning the house has changed me in ways I couldn’t have seen in 2016. I knew I needed to be prepared for all the costs involved with becoming a homeowner. I have had to replace the compressor on my air conditioning unit, buy a new clothes washer, fix my furnace and duct work in the basement, gut the basement and put new walls up, take a giant tree down in my front yard, tear down a rotting deck then build a new one, and the roof’s time will be coming soon. I haven’t even gotten to do projects that I help me enjoy stuff in my house more like better countertops. I have completed most of what I want to do on outside decor and plants. I wouldn’t change anything I’ve done. It’s just really difficult to get ahead so the next wave doesn’t wash me away. That reality has taken a toll on whatever value I placed on the emotional well-being before buying the house. Making money really does matter the most. Owning a house has 100% been the life changer it is billed to be.