How I Bought a House at 21 Making $17,000/ Year

Who doesn’t dream about their own home? I had always dreamed of owning my very own house. And at the ripe old age of 21, my husband and I bought our first house while he was making $17,000. This left a lot of people asking how I bought a house at 21!

Here’s the secret: it wasn’t easy, but we still did it… and it was so worth it!

I thought that because we had such a low income that we’d be doomed to renting our whole lived, but that wasn’t the case.

When we wanted to have more children, we knew that we’d need to have a bigger house than our 2-bedroom townhouse. When I started looking for rentals that would meet our criteria, I realized that we’d be looking at more than $150 extra a month in rent… for an apartment.

It was depressing and disheartening. It was then that I had the craziest idea in the world: why don’t I look at buying a house instead of renting?

Only rich people can afford to buy houses… you need 20% down! Even on a $100,000 house, that’s $20,000! There’s no way that we could ever save that much!

All of the negatives swirled around in my mind until I spoke with a mortgage consultant and learned that there were other options. Options that would allow us, a family living on one income of $17,000, would be able to own our own home.

Seriously… how I bought a house at 21 making $17,000/ year.

We waited for the right house for a long time.

We were “in the market” for a house for more than a year. We were renting at the time, so we had a lot more flexibility and weren’t on a time crunch to move. We waited, and waited, and waited for the “right” house. We were immovable on our budget, so we needed to wait for houses to come into our price range that still met our needs.

We waited, and waited, and waited for the “right” house. We were immovable on our budget, so we needed to wait for houses to come into our price range that still met our needs.

We got a little lucky.

Our current house had been on the market for almost two years. The sellers were not motivated at all, and their realtor wasn’t very good. There were only 6 pictures of the house online, which is usually a sign that there’s something wrong with the house. The house was fine, the listing agent was just not very good.

We also found out that the sellers were going through a divorce, and we were buying the house at a point in time where they were desperate to sell. We got more than lucky from an unfortunate situation on their end.

We knew that this was a starter home, and wouldn’t be our forever home.

There’s no granite counter tops or a master suite, but that’s ok. For now. This is our first home, and we knew that when we bought it. We don’t have to be in love with every facet of this house. There are many things we’d change if we could, but we know that this house is temporary for us.

There are many things we’d change if we could, but we know that this house is temporary for us. Keeping that in mind helped us narrow down our wants and needs lists.

We compromised a lot.

I initially wanted a house on an acre of land in the middle of the woods. We just weren’t going to find that for $100,000. That was something for our forever home, not our starter home.

We had our basic needs met.

Remember the list of wants and needs? We needed a house with 3 bedrooms that stayed within our $100,000 budget. Those were really the only needs that we had. And those needs were met with our house. And that was fine with us!

We set our expectations very low.

No, for $100,000 we’re not going to get a mansion. And no, we shouldn’t expect to spend $200,000 on a house when we only made $17,000. We knew that in order to stay on budget, we’d need to accept that almost all of the houses that we were going to see were going to be fixer-uppers.

We were ready to put in the “sweat equity” to make whatever house we got into a home.

We acknowledged that we made mistakes.

We made a lot of mistakes. There are so many things that I wish that I knew before buying our first home. But that’s ok!

We learned a lot…

With every mistake, we kept reminding ourselves that this was our first home. The next one will be better! We’re kind of optimists.

…sometimes we learned the hard way.

We might have learned a lot of lessons, but 99% of all of the lessons we learned… we learned the hard way. The not fun way. The sometimes very expensive way.

I’m pretty sure that every first-time home buyer will say that they learned more than a few expensive lessons the hard way. And the only thing to do is to keep moving forward and to not make the same mistake with the next house you buy.

How I bought a house at 21 is very different than many people and their first-time home purchases. No two people have the same life stories. No one is going to have the same home buying experience as someone else.

My hope is that you’ll know that you can buy a house. You don’t need to wait until you have a $100,000-a-month job or  $200,000 to put as your down payment.

We really did it. We did it without anyone else’s financial support. We did it with only the advice from our realtor (who was a God-send!) to help guide us.

When did you buy your first house? How did you feel about your starter home?