My First Home Purchase
1989, after several years of traveling the country working for the US Forest Service, we had just had our third child, I had started my forestry consulting firm a few months earlier, and now it was time to really settle down and buy a home.
I didn’t think that I could afford to buy a home, until I got the final "why not" message from an unlikely source. I had just hired a part time assistant who had been on welfare since she started having children in high school, and she told me that she was a homeowner, and how she had accomplished it. My next question to myself was, if she can do it with very little income, then why can’t two highly educated professionals like my wife and I do it? This led me to start getting serious about achieving my dream of being a homeowner.
Once a dream is announced, it’s inevitable that it will be achieved.
A few months later my wife got a new teaching job at a nearby Catholic school, I was dropping her off there one Saturday morning when I met the janitor. I happened to mention to him that I was hoping to buy a home nearby, hopefully something with some acreage, he mentioned that he had a place that he would like to sell.
He had a 118 acre old rocky farm with an old farmhouse that he thought was ready to tear down.
I was in love, this land was too rocky to plant crops but perfect to plant trees on, and the house was something that I could fix!
And I could afford the $30k asking price.
My in laws were not impressed with what they referred to as a "hunting shack", but they did loan me the last $800 that I needed for a down payment and dedicated dozens of weekends and thousands in building supplies to turning the old farmhouse into a home that their grandchildren could live in.
I still own that old farm, and my family and I lived in it for over a decade before upgrading to a nicer home. Over the years that old farm not only raised a lot of trees, dogs and kids, it also paid for itself several times over by selling off slivers to other people who wanted a place in the country.
I would like to thank the many people who aided me in this first investment of many in the real estate world, not the least of these is my old assistant who showed me that anybody can buy a home, all that it really takes is the realization that, you can if you try.
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