We bought our house in Raleigh, NC, in 2021 at the largesse of my in-laws, who generously gave my husband the down payment and helped us pay the moving expenses.
The market: Super hot and hard to break into. Lots of people were moving here from out of state (MA, NY, CA), lured by the easy cost of living and the kinds of jobs where they could work from home with their out-of-state salary. Demand vastly outpaced inventory. A house would go on the market in the morning and be under contract by noon. Buyers were offering asking price and over, paying cash (!!!) and putting down 10,000 or 20,000 or more in due diligence and foregoing inspections. Open houses were mob scenes. THAT was the real estate hellscape in which we got our house.
Our situation: The lease was ending on the house we had been renting for the last three years, with zero chance to renew. I would've been fine renting another home, except that the rental market was even tighter.
We don't have lucrative jobs. My husband has an extremely specialized job that requires him to work on site. A few years before, when our kids were young, he got accepted to trade school in PA, so we left our jobs and moved for his career shift. I fell into the trap of being the primary parent while he was in school/training, and my career stalled and hasn't recovered.
I'm a freelance writer and editor. My husband's new career, while fulfilling to him, does not pay well and has us anchored here. Our combined income, when we bought our house, was a pitiful $80,000.
The plot twist: My in-laws are retired physicians who have done very well for themselves and have always helped out my husband financially. My FIL has a lot of influence on my husband, who in turn takes his father's advice—no matter how impractical and outdated—as gospel truth, and he lives in fear of disappointing his father. In this case, FIL dangled the carrot of a substantial down payment while playing on his son's insecurities. "You need a tax shelter! Renting is throwing away money!" Wealthy retired boomer talk.
Given his lifetime of financial assistance, my husband has pretty good credit—college paid for, no car payment, and he uses his parent's credit card for unexpected expenses. My parents are solidly blue collar, lower middle class, not college educated. My credit is so-so enough to be a detriment, so only my husband prequalified, and any home loan would be in his name only. I still carry shame in knowing that my income and credit history wasn't good enough to help us buy a home.
While the loan would be my husband's name, it fell on me (because I work from home) to do 95% of the legwork of buying a home: All the paperwork rigamarole and calls and emails with the lender, underwriter, insurance, closing attorney, our realtor, etc. I also ended up having the awkward conversations with my FIL about the gift money: exactly how much we needed, how to do the wire transfer, etc. It's really hard to be strictly transactional when talking about so much money with family.
The house: We were lucky to have an extremely patient and savvy realtor. The house we bought is a 4 BR, 2.5 BA, in a respectable neighborhood with good schools. This house hit the market at 9 am on a Tuesday, and my realtor and I had 15 minutes to see it inside and out while my husband was at work -- he didn't see it until we were under contract! We offered the asking price of $495,000 and $10,000 in due diligence, with some other concessions. My FIL groused that we offered the asking price and didn't counter. We locked in an interest rate under 3%, and I don't think we had any PMI.
Of course, buying a home is one of the most stressful things you can ever do...doing it with someone else's money adds a whole other dimension of tension. We are incredibly lucky to have found this home in an impossible housing market. But it was ONLY possible because of my husband's generational wealth, and it feels like we've cheated the system.
The reality of living in a home we couldn't afford to buy on our own is that we are perpetually house-poor. On paper, it looks like we can afford the mortgage, but in reality, we are barely getting by. Houses are not self-sustaining! In this sense, houses are a scam. As I write this, I'm looking at a $1,000 quote to remove a tree that's listing towards the house, $1,200 to replace the badly warped front door, $500-700 for way-overdue pressure washing and gutter cleaning, $500 to re-seed the front yard...and $7,000 for a new furnace. Cosmetic "wish list" things like replacing the dining room carpet with hardwood or re-doing a bathroom or buying new bedroom furniture are out of the question right now.
Having generational wealth and growing up seeing his parent's disposable income has stunted my husband's confidence as a homeowner. He isn't very handy and his DIY skills are self-taught. Growing up, his father didn't do anything around the house beyond mowing the yard. His parents outsourced EVERYTHING, even going so far as to hire a handyman to install simple shelving and hang pictures! They never had to take out a HELOC or second mortgage to, say, renovate their basement or build a new deck; they just paid outright for the work. It's been a learning experience encouraging my husband be self-sufficient and take actual ownership of maintenance issues, and accept that the way his parents did things is the exception and not the norm.
I don't want to have to ask my in-laws for financial help every time we face a repair or issue that could otherwise bankrupt us. Our house is a blessing...and a constant reminder of how little we have, how hard it is to save, and that we could not and cannot do it on our own, without generational wealth.
