Paying Off the House, Part I: The Big Picture

About this time last year, we paid off our house!

We purchased it in September 2009 and paid it off in August 2018, which I thought was pretty good.

This is the part where most bloggers announce something dramatic, like living on Ramen noodles and dandelions, or the opposite – they casually mention that they're both computer programmers making big salaries.

Sorry to disappoint you, but neither of those is true.  We lived a pretty ordinary lifestyle which is frugal, but not extreme.  And during the time that we were paying down the mortgage, we never even made six figures… combined.

During those nine years, we both worked different kinds of jobs, but I had an 11-year stint as a part-time English teacher at a religious college, which was fun and fulfilling, but not as lucrative as working full-time might have been.  (Well, maybe not as lucrative. Writers get paid wildly different amounts depending on where they work.  When I was job hunting after leaving teaching, two companies calls to offer me a job as a writer on the same day.  One offered me $55,000 a year and the other one $30,000.  I ended up taking neither of them, but you get the idea.)  My husband worked for eight years as an administrative assistant at another religious institution, and while we were both paid pretty well under the circumstances, it was nothing lavish.  So really, for us, it comes down to everyday frugality.

Everybody wants the secret sauce.  But the thing is, everyone has financial advantages and disadvantages.  We aren't any different.

Financial disadvantages:

• Long stints at religious institutions – we weren’t doing it for the money, which was good!
• Lots of years in graduate school.  I have a PhD in English and my husband has a master’s degree.  He worked while he was getting his, so that was not that much of a disadvantage, but mine meant I spent that a big chunk of time out of the workforce in order to earn a degree that actually made me less employable.  We don't have any student loan debt, though, as I went to school on a free ride and my husband's education we paid for as we went.  (I'm not saying graduate school is a bad idea.  It depends very much on your field of study. Just do your research.)
• My husband worked for three years in a city that was 59 miles away, meaning that we often averaged $250 a month on gasoline.
• We had medical costs, although mercifully nothing serious.
• His family lives overseas, meaning travel costs are much higher when he visits them.
• My husband tends to grow in his career by switching not just jobs, but fields.  Ergo, he ends up starting on the bottom a lot.

Financial advantages:

• We paid off my husband's student loans before we bought a house. I never had any loans.  (My parents didn't spring for college – I had academic-merit scholarships all the way through.)
• Because we spent so much time in graduate school, always dreaming that we would get some wonderful job someplace else, we rented for the first nine years of our marriage, rather than buying a house right away.  We had almost accidentally saved up a pretty hefty down payment, nearly $20,000.
• My parents live nearby, so there is someone to help with things that we might otherwise have to pay someone to do or to borrow things that we might otherwise rent.  For example, Mom will come over and water plants when we're out of town, and Dad will lend us tools.
• We live in part of the country with a very low cost of living, particularly for housing.  When we bought our four-bedroom house in 2009, it cost $130,000.  It's an ordinary neighborhood, a little older, but centrally located.
• We’re curious, independent types who tend to ask, “Can we fix it or build it ourselves?” before we call someone else to fix it or build it.

Stuff that is both:

• We were never blessed with children, which, while that was not the plan, has probably been cheaper in the short term.  In our old age, however, is going to prove very expensive, as we will need paid care much sooner than if we had had children to drop by and check on us, or take us to the grocery store.
• My husband has a gluten intolerance. Even a microscopic amount will make him sick. Ergo, we eat out maybe once or twice a year.  Big savings.  We have to buy gluten-free versions of pizza, pasta, bread, etc.  Those are expensive.  Eventually, I'm hoping we will be buying a lot less of those.  (I have plans to eventually take over the grocery shopping, plus making a lot more stuff from scratch.)

Next Week: How We Did It