I Bought A House And It's Financially Crushing Me

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I am 28 years old. I recently just bought my first house and it's overwhelmingly stressful for me. There's been some problems that popped up and I just didn't expect to have this much stress like to what point where I can't sleep. The point where I had to go get medication from the doctor and I'm just really considering selling the house and going back to apartment living where I was stress-free and to not have the weight of a house, you know, on me right now. I just don't know what to do. You just walked through the first chapter of my anxiety book. I've been there. Exact same spot. So help me, if you think about your fear and your anxiousness globally, distill it down for me. Be very specific. Give me two or three or four things that are keeping you up at night. So there, when I first moved into the house, I noticed, or I got a, I noticed there was mold in the basement and other parts of the house. Did you have the house inspected? It was not inspected. No. No. Oh no. Oh geez. Okay. Yeah. But there's some good news actually. When I, so I noticed mold in the basement. It was pretty, pretty bad in the basement, but I contacted the seller who agreed to pay for the remediation of the basement actually. So that the basement is now cleaned and remediated and he paid for it fully. He didn't have to, but he, he did. So I was really lucky with that. Yeah. You don't hear that very often. That's still pretty great. I just feel like there's still like, I just have this like thing in the back of my head where I think there's like mold everywhere and behind the walls and I'm just not noticing it. And, um, I feel like I have a scratchy throat all the time, but maybe it's just because I'm so paranoid and stressed. Yeah. Um, where else besides your house, where else are you, um, a generally anxious guy? What other things keep you up at night? Um, in terms of the house? Nope. Not how take house off the table. Okay. Um, I'm very indecisive person. So I stress about a lot of like any major decision. I wait till the last minute to make it and then I feel like I regret it. Okay. Um, give me another one. Um, I'm not really stressed about my job at all, but, um, so that's good. But what's the state of your relationships? Um, I have good family and parents are alive, healthy. Um, I just recently made a relationship with someone, um, that, you know, the past month. So that's going well. So who, when you hear the story in your head that you make bad choices, that you're going to make a wrong choice, that you're going to screw this up again, whose voice is that? Don't wait for the interest rate to be perfect before buying or refinancing a home. Talk to Churchill mortgage, smart buyers, buy the home they can afford now, and then refinance later. If rates improve Churchill helps you make decisions with confidence instead of guessing. And Churchill mortgage has a webpage with special offers just for our audience. Go to churchillmortgage.com slash Ramsey offer. This is a paid advertisement in MLS ID one five nine one in the MLS consumer access.org equal housing lender. Whose voice is that? Cause it didn't start in your head. Whose voice are you beginning to repeat in your own words? Um, I don't, I guess, I don't know. I don't, I don't know what your, what your question is actually. So when you're indecisive, right, should I do this or should I buy this car, the red car or the green car? Well, if I buy the green car, it's going to have this many miles. And if it's got, if I buy this car, it's the wheels may fall off. And if I, and then you buy the red car and you're like, man, I should've bought the green car. Underneath that narrative is a story running through your veins that you don't make good choices or that there's always going to be another shoe that drops or you didn't plan right. Whose voice is that? Who told you that I don't, I don't know. I guess to me, if you think it comes from me myself, but I'm just not, okay. You know, I don't make, even if I make a decision, I regret the decision and then kind of super indecisive, but I've known that about myself for a while. Okay. That's where I want you to sit down with a licensed mental health professional and walk through it and not sit down and say, I am anxious and indecisive and I want to talk about it. I want you to sit down with a therapist and say, I've struggled with indecisiveness and with a meta narrative in my life that I'm probably going to screw up the next thing. And I want to be free from that on the other side of it. And any licensed professional should be able to walk you through that. Cause there's some pretty simple action steps in a therapeutic setting to walk somebody through that. I've been there. I've been on the other side of it. Okay. And also when I found myself in your exact situation, we don't have mold as much in Texas. We had different stuff. Part of my panic that I had all the time, 24 seven was I had put my, my family in a really financially precarious situation. Cause we had six figures of student loans. We had two car payments. We had credit cards and we had this house on top of all of it. Yeah. Michael, what's your financial situation? So currently I make like 75 grand a year and an IT job. I actually just got, cause I've been so stressed out the past month. So I actually just applied and I got a job, um, making like a hundred grand. So I start that in like three weeks. So this, that kind of helps me a lot. Okay. What kind of debt do you have about the financial situation? Um, I don't have any credit card debt. I have both my cars I've paid off. I just have student loans at about 35 grand, maybe. Okay. Um, do you have cash in the bank? Yeah, about eight grand in the bank. In the bank. Okay. And how much did this house cost? 270. Okay. How much did you put down? Uh, I just, first time homebuyer, so I put down, um, the minimum, which was like 2.5%, I think. Okay. Um, but I did get a grant for 15K that covered pretty much all the closing costs. Sure. So I think just a couple of learnings, Michael, going forward, that part of your stress is caused by you don't have a ton of cash in the bank that can help maybe mitigate if there was a massive mold problem, right? Or whatever it looks like. You have, you still have student loan debt. Um, you put down not a ton, right? We would say at least 5% if you're a first time homebuyer on our end. So you did even less than that. Um, they're like, everything is a little bit out of order and then you didn't do an inspection, which now you've learned your lesson on that. Um, yeah. So there's just some, there's some lessons to be learned and it's been done and you're doing this a little out of order. So a couple of things to do just to create for today's sake, some peace is I would, I would, I would hire a company to come in, test areas of your house just so you know of, okay, is there mold everywhere? Is it just in my head, right? You can figure that out. And so go get some tests done. Let them run the stuff in the vents. Like you can figure out kind of where is the state of my house. My fear is, is this right here? I'm overthinking. I think I'm, I have a scratchy throat. I'm paranoid. Get it taken care of, get the answer. And then from there planning out, okay, if there is mold, I go down path A. If there's not, then there's plan B. Um, but from a financial perspective, your number one goal is to get the student loan cleaned up. And I would do that within the next nine months, especially with your new job, living on nothing. Um, if the house does need repairs and things like put it in order and cash flow all of them, because you will be more stressed, Michael, if you go deeper in debt or you go get a second mortgage or you take out a HELOC, right. And you keep adding on to your debt to fix this house, that's going to cause more and more stress. So I would get all the facts I could down on paper, prioritize them and just start knocking them out. And again, I probably would not jump the boat right now and sell the house. I probably wouldn't unless it's just absolutely falling apart. I don't know. I don't know why you would, but I, I would stick in a couple of years if you could. But now I think it's one of these things like that was stupid. That was so stupid that I did X, Y, and Z. Right. And we call it stupid tax around here and say it out loud and you learn from it. We've all done stupid stuff, um, made bad decisions, but I think clarifying those and seeing those is going to help you move forward. And I think some of the sphere too, I mean, I'm not, I'm not a therapist, but is in your head. And I think you can get some of those answers. You get some of those answers. Yeah. So if you're financially precarious, your body's right to sound all your alarms. So don't try to silence those alarms. Like Rachel said, information will be your friend at this stage. So go get those facts, go sit down with a counselor and yeah, if you can stick it out, stick it out, stick it out, create your free, every dollar budget today, the simplest way to budget for your life.