For me, it’s a real pleasure to trace the origin of something big back to a tiny detail. Sometimes all it takes is one little idea to guide you down the rabbit hole and gift you a major lightbulb moment.
For me, it all started with a garden. And a blog (not mine).
It wasn’t Young House Love just yet. Though that inevitably did come later.
An acquaintance of mine shared a blog post of her own to her Facebook page back in 2011. Newly married, my husband and I were trying to build our life [and get our shit] together.
This friend’s blog was all about gardening. She lived in an adorable little house and shared about such wonderful botanical additions to her home. I loved it and then sank at the thought of asking my landlord if I could tear up his backyard.
Then I wondered….. “Would we be able to buy our own little place?” Our townhome was nice, but we’d just come off of paying way more for a wedding than our broke asses could afford. It just hadn’t really come up yet.
So I pulled up some listings in our area. Just to note, we don’t live in a big city, but our area has a higher cost of living because the median income is weirdly high.
At the time, we had virtually no savings and lived out of our checking account. It probably had $1,000 at any given time. My estimate would be a net worth of right around $0 (I still had a small car loan). I found a home that more closely resembled a rinky-dink shack and realized we wouldn’t even have the $6,000 down payment for that. To be honest, I can’t even remember if that was even a full 20% down calculation.
That day, I found Suze Orman after a Google search about how to buy a home.
I had obviously heard of her before, but had never watched her show. One thing led to another, and, before you knew it, I was personal finance obsessed (I am an exhilarating creature, to be sure).
The “Can I Afford It?” and “How Am I Doing?” segments, in particular, were my favorite. I watched as many episodes as possible until I felt like I could answer a lot of the questions myself.
This went on for weeks, during which time I made our first little budget, including allotments for savings.
At 25, I was saving with real purpose for the first time in my life, and I loved it!
In 2014, almost exactly 3 years later, we bought our first home. We weren’t exactly looking when we found it, and we didn’t have the full 20% down payment I would have preferred, but we did have about $20,000 saved by that point. We felt good about the purchase.
And I have my garden. <3
-K