And Why The Pros Still Outweigh All Those Cons
In my 20s I treated responsibility as something that was to be avoided at all costs.
Besides getting a job that has turned into a career, pretty much every other part of life that required responsibility, I nimbly dodged like a Barry Sanders 2,000 yard season.
Like the 21st century – whose greatest test will be to survive the mistakes of the 20th – my 30s have been all about re-assessing the assumptions and decisions that led me to being a single, renting, still-trying-to-rap white guy on the last day of my 29th year.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The great thing about my 30s is that, somehow, stability and security feel rewarding, and responsibility has more upsides than my 25-year-old, barely-developed brain could have ever imagined.
So We Bought A House
Like many millennials, I did the growing up thing in the reverse order of my parents: career, house, wife for me, wife, house, career for them.
The median age of marriage has risen to 29.5 for men and 27.4 for women in 2017, up from 23 for men and 20.8 for women in 1970.
It just so happened that generationally-increased student debt and the 2008 financial crisis were perfectly timed to allow my “fuck it” mentality to flourish and spread throughout my 20s like global pandemics across countries without secure healthcare.
So, although I was in my early/mid 30s, it was a bit surprising how quickly my girlfriend and I went from considering moving to a new apartment, to absolutely knowing we needed a home of our own.
Within a week of thinking about it, we had suddenly had enough of a degenerate landlord who literally took our recycling out of the recycling and threw it in the garbage because he was too lazy or irresponsible to buy more recycling bins, enough of god-knows-who outside our front door, visiting the neighbors we could hear through the walls at all times of night, enough of 3 story walk ups from a too-small parking spot we were considered lucky to have.
Who knew the decision to pursue home ownership had so much in common with a Drake chorus?
100 to 0
As white millennials, we had lots of advantages that I will address later, but the house buying process ramped up quickly, and within a year we went from not even considering property ownership to moving in and painting every single wall of a 2-bedroom, century-old home.
Some of those walls were painted twice, in slightly different shades of white, to enable the trim to pop, of course.
In that first year of home ownership, every single one of my fears came true.
Let’s look at a bullet point list of year-1 calamities:
- Our basement had 3x the level of Radon the US recommends.
- Our dryer broke down.
- The washer broke down.
- The dishwasher started melting everything in it.
- We ripped up an entire living room and stairway’s worth of carpet.
- The dryer broke again.
- Our gas got turned off during winter.
- Our cats peed on every single thing on the floor in our basement.
- A domestic abuse incident broke out next door while I was out of town, cops were called.
- The dryer broke again.
- Some-fucking-body kept parking their broke down cars and trailers in front of our house for weeks at a time.
- The lawnmower filled our neighborhood with white smoke after only minutes of use.
- We painted every room of the house, some twice, and every cabinet in our kitchen.
- One of the 4 sets of drapes I installed got ripped, much too easily, off the wall.
- Stripping the front steps and staining them took 3 months longer than expected.
- The heater stopped working for days at a time.
If you had told me that all these things would happen in my first year of home ownership, you very well may have scared me off.
But home ownership and responsibility-in-my-30s have a lot in common: they are surprisingly rewarding, and the opportunity cost to meet that responsibility was more affordable than I had always feared.
We got a home warranty which only charged us $100 for our appliance calls.
When my girlfriend smelled gas, called the gas company and they found a 10% leak in our basement pipes, we spent a long night getting colder and colder but plumbers arrived in the next day, and our pipes are up to date now.
When our neighbor parking their misbegotten investments right outside our house got too irritating we were able to call the police who towed them within 48 hours. Gotta love those private property protecting police!
When the guy who came to fix our dryer, didn’t fix it after 2 visits, he came out and fixed it on the third.
That white smoke from the lawnmower was because we had too much oil in the oil tank, my father and a repairshop owner told us.
When our cats peed on everything in our basement…well that ruined more than one weekend. But our basement is spotless!
The only thing I would ever warn everyone against, the only project that turned out to be not only harder than we expected, but more painful than we could have possibly imagined, was stripping and re-staining our steps that had been painted over, annually, for 20+ years.
Pay a teenager to strip that stuff off or you’ll spend weeks with a tarp over your front steps, and months wondering when you’ll find the time to finish it.
The thing that ties all these inconveniences together is how quickly we were able to resolve them.
In all my years of renting, every single broken dishwasher or clogged-beyond-plunging toilet took days of calls and negotiations with landlords, the entire experience filled with the anxiety of the powerless, not knowing when or if the inconveniences that reminded me of my lack ownership would be fixed.
Although that list of 15+ items feels like a lot when written out, each “calamity” only represents a one, or two, day problem.
Sure, we had to call the dryer guy way too many times, but we could still dry our clothes on our clothesline, in our own yard.
Yes, those cars and trailers blocking easy access to our house occurred over weeks and even months, but I only thought about them for minutes at a time until they were finally towed.
The domestic abuse incident was no joke and traumatizing to my finacee, but that could happened just as easily, if not more so, in a rented property.
And In The End
There is no feeling like cleaning up your yard – mowing the uneven lawn, picking up the sticks that fall from the old trees, digging out the gutter that fills too quickly – and walking back towards your home.
It is an ancient feeling, a deeply peaceful reward. A shelter-high akin to a runner’s.
Our ancestors must have had a similar feeling when they got their huts situated just right, or their gardens rid of destructive detritus, their wood chopped in time for dinner, or their fire pit dug out before dark.
There is no calm like the calm of driving, at the end of a long work day, towards a home you feel like you chose.
Sure, we couldn’t live anywhere we wanted, but striking out and finding a neighborhood we liked, and a house we loved, outweighed all the years of walking up to a trendy-neighborhood apartment, cramming everything I owned into a room whose windows only opened to the sounds of traffic, no matter the time of day.
We Are Lucky, We Are White
To anyone who is starting to think about buying a home, I absolutely recommend it.
But I have to be honest about how we got here.
When we started looking for houses, we were pretty sure we could do it on our own.
When it came time to buy, it was clear we could not.
But in that time our parents, unsolicited (we are lucky, we are white), gave us enough to cover our closing costs, with enough leftover to make the random costs of moving affordable.
We had our down payment and had secured the loan, but without those gifts from our parents I would not be typing this from the living room of a home built in 1906.
I am the result of generational wealth.
And it is often a lot less than people think it is.
At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016.
When I hear the word “wealth” I think of housewives inheriting millions, or trust fund babies never having to work.
But in many cases, it’s something as “little” as being able to ask your parents for a few hundred dollars to cover a car repair bill, or even having a credit card – dependent on good credit – to put that expense on.
In other cases, it’s the financial comfort that comes from not being the first generation in your family to “make it”.
Even though black and Hispanic Millennials are less likely to receive financial support from parents, their parents are more likely than white parents to expect their kids to help financially support them later on. According to the Clark poll, upward of 80 percent of black parents and 70 percent of Hispanic parents expect to be supported.
And while I never expect to inherit anything from my Milwaukee Public School and Gas Company working parents, I have already received more than I could have ever asked for (though I did ask for most of it).
The years in college borrowing money to pay a bill I mismanaged.
The years after college when I was laid off during the 2008 recession, living on unemployment and part-time 2010 Census work.
The time I told them I would buy a house and they announced they would help out.
I could not have bought this house without my, and my fiancee’s, parental contributions.
We’re the lucky ones and even then, we were in our 30s before we could even think about buying a house for the first time.
About 40 percent of adults said that if faced with a $400 unexpected expense, they would either not be able to pay it or would do so by selling something or borrowing money,
I have no illusions about how much I’ve accomplished on my own, and that I think, more than guilt, that is something white people – and rich people, and men, and straight people – should keep close in mind when walking through the world.
Or when recommending to others that they buy a house.
I couldn’t be happier about owning a home, and I did a lot of work to buy this house, but I could never have done it alone.