This week, Ben and I achieved a goal we've been actively working on the last eight years--we paid off our house!
The Goal and The Numbers:
Saving up for our house:
- We started saving for our house at the beginning of 2015 (around the same time Ben went full time with his business)
- We saved for just over 3 years, closing in February of 2018
- Our goal while we were saving was a 50% down payment
- Our house cost $290,000 to build and we had a 51% down payment when we closed
- Our average income between 2015-2018 was $85,000
Paying off our house:
- We closed on our house in February of 2018
- Our goal going into our mortgage was to pay it off within 3-5 years
- Our income dropped right as we got into our house, making it impossible for us to pay it off in 3 years. As we got closer to the five years, we were really close (under $20,000) and we decided we wanted to try for the 5-year mark.
- We made the final payment in January of 2023, almost exactly 5 years after closing on it
- Our average income during those years was $51,000
The Why Behind Our Goal
When we were first married, Ben and I dreamed together and we had a lot of big ideas of what we wanted our life to look like--for me to stay home with the kids and homeschool, for Ben to run his own business from home, for us to travel together, to own a home and be financially independent.
While we had those dreams, we didn't have a plan to get there. We were both going to school full time, had different part time jobs making less than $18,000 a year, with about $5000 in student loans. We had financial aid and some scholarships to help with schooling and both came from homes where we were taught the importance of thrift and hard work. We didn't have any other debt and had kept our student loans small. But we were making a small amount of money and didn't have a good system for budgeting. We were truly living off of love and tithing blessings.
About a year and half after we were married in 2014, I was six months pregnant with our first. I was about to finish school and Ben was making YouTube videos on a channel that was doing very well (he had even started making a very small amount of ad revenue from it). As we drove out to Vernal to visit Ben's family, we decided to listen to an audiobook his parents had given us--The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.
As we listened, we didn't need to be sold on the ideas of living debt free and being financially independent--these were ideas we had both been taught our entire lives and things we wanted for our own lives. The thing the book gave us was a solid roadmap to get there.
Ben switched jobs to a full-time programming position and our income more than doubled. We were now making $40,000 a year and also started budgeting that same month. I felt like we suddenly had so much money! We immediately got our $1000 emergency fund and then started paying towards my student loans.
During this time, Ben had an idea for a book about programming in GameMaker, the software he was teaching on YouTube channel. In September, we did a Kickstarter for it. We were asking $1,000 (looking back, not nearly enough, but we were learning) and we made our goal in a day! This book was something that his audience really wanted, and the Kickstarter ended up raising over $11,000. We were ecstatic!
After saving what we needed to print and ship the book, we used the rest of the money to finish paying off the student loan and get our emergency fund. We also had Ashtyn during this time, and I finished up school. Now we were feeling ready to buy a house, but we needed to save up a down payment first.
We had our income from Ben's job and his book was consistently making over $1,000 a month. That wasn't enough to live on, but I was confident that if Ben went full time with his business, he could get our income up to what we needed. He was confident that he could as well but was more wary of how long it would take him to do so. He didn't feel ready to quit his job and do his business full time.
Our opportunity came when our landlords gave us notice that we needed to move out of the apartment (we were month to month at the time and they had a daughter who needed the apartment). We used the few months we had to figure out what we wanted to do. We looked at apartments closer to Ben's work, but I suggested moving to Vernal where rent was a lot cheaper (when we got married, I hadn't ever thought I would suggest that). We ended up moving to Vernal and staying with Ben's sister as we tried Ben's business. It was a win-win because we got a place to stay for free/inexpensive and her husband was traveling a lot. We thought we'd be there for just a couple months but ended up staying with her for over 7 months, which was a huge blessing for us in our financial journey.
The first month we were there, Ben didn't have the internet he needed to be streaming, so he decided to use his time and record a programming course teaching people how to make games in GameMaker. The course was phenomenally successful! As his course and book continued to sell well, we set our goal of saving up a 50% down payment on our house (we were thinking of buying a $250,000 house at the time).
We had already seen the benefits of smart financial decisions--if we hadn't been debt free with an emergency fund, Ben wouldn't have had the freedom to quit his job and start on his own business. Doing that had changed the entire trajectory of our lives for the better, and we were determined to have a paid off house as quickly as we could.
How We Did It
Ben's business continued to do well and did better each year. Because we had no debt, we had very few expenses. We had Parker during this time and our growing family prompted us to move from Melissa's house to an apartment of our own. In Vernal, our rent on a nice 3-bedroom apartment was $750 a month. Eating out was a treat, we limited our travel to visiting family, and continued driving our very quirky, two-door car (with two kids, driving that two-door car sometimes seemed like the biggest sacrifice to me in all that we did to save up for our down payment).
I remember trying to keep our budget at $2,000 or under during this time and there were months we were able to put very big chunks towards our house. We had a chart we had made where we were able to mark in every $1000 we put towards the house savings, and it was really fun when we were able to fill in 5 or 7 of those in a month.
Our move to Vernal was supposed to be temporary--a year while we saved up. This quickly turned longer as we changed our goal from a 20% down payment to a 50% down payment. We started looking at houses in Herriman and balked at the price. A house in the Salt Lake area was over $100,000 more than the same house in Vernal.
We started talking about whether or not we wanted to leave Vernal. We loved living close to Ben's family and there were other things about Vernal that we really enjoyed (less traffic, an amazing library, fun lakes and hiking trails very close by). The hardest thing for me was that living in Vernal meant no longer dancing with my dance group. That was a really hard choice for me and it's still something I miss desperately at times. We ultimately decided Vernal was the place we wanted to settle down and started actively looking at houses in 2016.
It was hard to find a house that we really liked. It seemed like every house we looked at had something weird or that we didn't like (that was also a hard thing to change). We did find one house that we put an offer on, but they wanted us to pay more than we were willing and we had to walk away (they later asked us if we were still interested, but we weren't by then). In December of 2016, we decided to build.
We found a builder we loved, came up with a floor plan we were excited about, and found a lot to buy. We ended up adding a basement to our plans and chose a lot that was a little more expensive to get a good location. We wanted a quiet location for when Ben was recording and also wanted a location that would make it easy to sell our house if we later decided to go that route. Because of the basement and location, we were higher than we originally planned, with our house costing $290,000 total.
While we love our house and location, there were definitely times while we were paying it off that we wished we had just bought a house under $250,000 so that we could have paid it off sooner. I do think it was good for us try the house we have, but now we know that we actually would prefer a smaller house on more land and may someday move (without debt this time). If we don't, though, our house and location is something that we know we will be happy in and that we can truly make our own.
The entire building process took about a year and we were able to move into our house December of 2017. Right as we got into our house, two harder changes happened--we found out we were expecting our third (morning sickness is rough if you're in a two-week process of moving with kids) and our income dropped considerably. The software that Ben was teaching made a significant change, making almost all of his courses and his book obsolete. What was worse was that a lot of people (including Ben) didn't like some of the changes made and stopped using the software.
Ben wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his business. Other content creators he talked with found that their courses (unrelated to GameMaker) were not doing as well either. The site he used to host his courses was making changes as well that were negatively affecting people's sales. We weren't sure what direction to go in and tried a few things.
We were able to make it through that rough patch and Ben made a course for a new software that he was really liking called Godot. He also changed his host site and raised his price (the other site had his courses selling for basically $10, a ridiculously low amount). The result blew us away and we made enough that we felt that our goal of paying off the house in 5 years might be possible again.
It was harder to gain traction once we were in our house. Not only were our expenses higher (utilities and maintenance were much more in a house than an apartment, we had two babies while in the house, we had more kids and kids who were getting older and had more expenses, and of course, inflation) but we were also making less. It could be really discouraging at times, but the boost from Ben's new course really helped with our morale.
Once we were in our house, we still made sacrifices to pay it off early, but we weren't quite as intense about it. We went out to eat more often (but still tried to make our own meals most of the time), paid someone to finish our front yard, and even went on a cruise together. Most of the sacrifices were things like continuing to wait to travel, buying a budget van (though we honestly love our van, especially after our old car), and mostly just waiting for things we wanted to upgrade. Our most common phrase was, "After we pay off the house ..." 😂
Benefits
Looking back, it has been so worth it. I feel that this goal has not only taught me things like how to budget and keep our expenses low, but also given me a great sense of gratitude for what I have. Ben and I's relationship has been immensely strengthened as we have worked and sacrificed together for a common goal. Our kids have been a part of the process and I hope they take what they've learned from it into their own adult lives.
Because we don't have a mortgage now, we have the freedom to do other things. We can invest more aggressively in our retirement (and some of those can be riskier as well). We can take smart risks with Ben's business and make it exactly what he wants it to be. We can give to others in ways that we have only dreamed about. We can travel and save and do what we want with our income, because it is now wholly ours. And we can do all that in a house that we love.
What We Learned
I listen to Dave Ramsey a lot and when he does Debt Free Screams with people, he always asks them what they would tell others trying to get out of debt--what is the key?
Because our debt-free journey was with buying and paying off our house, I want to look at that situation. Looking back, I have one thing that I think really helped us in paying off our house early.
When getting a mortgage, we went into it with the mindset of getting out of that debt as fast as possible. Because of Ben's current income when we were beginning to finance (we'd had a year close to $100K and then a year over 100K), we could have gotten a bigger mortgage even following Dave Ramsey's guidelines for buying a house (a 15-year fixed loan that is 25% or less than your take home pay).
Because we went into it with a goal of paying it off quickly, we spent as little as possible while still getting the house we wanted. While building, we went cheaper on anything we could. If we could upgrade it later, we spent less on it now. An example of this was when we did one-tone painting--it saved us over $5,000 to have them paint everything white instead of painting the walls gray. Because of our goal, when situations like that came up, it wasn't hard at all to go with the less expensive option.
Because we were conservative in how much we borrowed from the bank, we were just fine financially when our income dropped those first couple of years. We weren't able to put a lot extra towards the house, but we never had a month when we weren't able to pay all our bills. And as Ben's income came back up, it made it possible to pay it off as quickly as we did.
And doing a 15-year fixed loan was also a huge blessing to us. After we'd been in the house a year, we were feeling discouraged because we knew we wouldn't be paying it off in 3 years and it seemed unlikely we'd make it in even 5. Then was the moment we were most grateful for doing a 15-year loan instead of a 30--we knew that even if we never were able to put extra towards our house, we only had 14 years left rather than a discouraging 29.
How Grateful We Are
I am so grateful for the blessings we've been given. I know our situation is not what some others are facing--we were able to get a house for a fraction of what the market is like right now (even in Vernal, but especially other places in Utah). Ben's business has had times of bounty that have blown us away and those high years are what made it possible for us to do what we did. We also have had family and friends who have been so generous and kind in our leaner times and I will forever be grateful for them.
But most of all, I am so grateful for Benjamin. He has been a rock for me through all our financial situations. He has encouraged me, helped me, and sometimes corrected me as we have learned to budget together. He works so hard for our family (both by making money with his business and by being present with the kids and housework). I am grateful that he dreams with me and works with me to reach those dreams and I couldn't be more grateful for the life we are building together.
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