About Melissa Batai
During the last recession, my husband and I struggled. We had a car payment and credit card debt, lived in an apartment, and ate out frequently. In addition, my husband was in graduate school while I worked full-time. Thankfully, I did not lose my job as many others did during that time, but we still struggled financially. However, the lessons we learned and the behavioral changes we made then help us insulate ourselves from inflation now.
One of the trickiest parts of a new marriage is navigating the finances. Should you merge your money? Keep it separate? Who will manage the monthly budget? Who will handle the investments? Each of you has developed your personal attitude toward saving and spending, and you each had different financial upbringings. Successfully managing married finances may take a few years. However, for others, the struggle continues beyond that time, especially if your spouse refuses to follow a budget.
My husband and I had a slow start to homeownership. We lived in the suburbs of Chicago during our first 14 years of marriage. During the first 10 of those 14 years, I was the only one working full-time because my husband was getting his Master’s and then his Ph.D. However, when we both worked full-time, we still couldn’t afford a house because the property taxes were so high, and we had made so little money while he was in school. When we moved to Arizona, a state with low property taxes and home prices that were (at the time) more reasonable than Chicago homes, we decided to buy a house. However, we had some rough spots because we were buying a house before we were financially ready.
My husband and I tend to buy new cars and keep them until they die. My vehicle is 18 years old, and his is nine years old. We would have liked to have replaced my car last year, but with the market being the way it is, we’ve decided to wait as long as possible. Still, we are planning for the day we need to buy a replacement, so I’ve been researching options. In the process, I stumbled upon a unique take on paying for a car.
My husband recently accepted a new job in a new state, 2200 miles away from our home. The new job comes with a pay raise and significant promotion (love that!), but, unfortunately, the new state is also more expensive. While we do come out ahead financially even after accounting for the cost-of-living increase, our emergency fund did not. So, whether you’re like us and moving to a more expensive area or the cost of inflation is driving up your monthly expenses, make sure to reevaluate your emergency fund regularly.
We’re relocating from Arizona to New York because my husband found a good job there. While we’re happy to move, we’re sad to leave behind our house payment in Arizona. We had a 3.375 percent interest rate and a smaller mortgage than we’ll have when we move. In New York, our interest rate will be approximately 5.5 percent, and our mortgage will increase by 1/3. Ouch. However, we’re not paying extra on our new mortgage any time soon.
Eight years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. Ironically, when my husband showed me the property online, I didn’t even want to go see it. The pictures were terrible, and the house looked ugly. He convinced me to go, and I fell in love with the views. We knew the house needed work, but it was in our limited price range, so we bought it. Now, we’re on the opposite end, prepping our house for sale. Here’s our experience.
Since we knew we would move within the next few years, we began working on home improvements 18 months ago.
First, we had the exterior of our house painted.
Then, we painted our living room a cream color. (It had been sponge-painted desert shades of tan, burnt orange, and brown. Ugh.) We also put fresh coats of paint on several ceilings.
One of our biggest tasks was repainting our kitchen cabinets, which were original to the house. The varnish had worn off, and the doors looked old and outdated. I spent three weeks during the pandemic sanding them down and painting them white.
Seven months ago, we hired a tile company to remove the 24-year-old shower that was original to the master bathroom and put in a tile shower.
My husband has been interviewing for jobs for 18 months, so we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing real estate listings in several cities. We thought the houses that showed best were the ones that had almost all of the owner’s items removed and no personal pictures on the walls, so that’s what we did with our house. We packed almost everything up and removed it from our home. The only items left in the house are the kitchen items, our clothes, beds, and bedding.
We loved our realtor that helped us buy the house, so we chose her to help us sell the house. She’s been helpful as she’s guided us through this process.
After the tile company remodeled our master bath shower, we wanted them to remove our large mirror and outdated vanity and countertop. However, the tile company quoted $11k for that job. No thanks. So, our bathroom was unfinished and definitely not list-ready.
Our realtor works with one particular construction company regularly, so she contracted them for a bid. They not only replaced our master bathroom vanity, counter, and mirrors, but they also tiled our guest bathroom and replaced the vanity and counter in that room. In addition, they switched out the lights for both bathrooms and an exterior light, and fixed our sliding glass door handle, all for less than $8k.
If you’ve spent time looking at real estate, you know that some listing photos are awful. These photos are often of the furniture rather than the room itself. Or, they’re pictures of the bottom half of the room so you can’t see the entire space, or they’re blurry.
Our realtor paid to have a photographer she regularly works with come out and take the pictures. He did a fabulous job. Honestly, I don’t know why more realtors don’t do this. The better the pictures look online, the more likely people will come to see the property, and the more likely it will sell, assuring the realtor a paycheck.
I do not have a flair for decorating a house, so I appreciate all of our realtor’s suggestions. For instance, we have tan carpet on our living room floor. The realtor arranged our furniture the way she wanted and then asked me to buy a cream-colored area rug. I would not have put an area rug on a carpet, but her suggestion worked and made the large, rectangular living room look cozier.
I also never buy items like throw pillows, but I followed the suggestions and bought decorative pillows for our bed and the couch and love seat, making the house look more welcoming and inviting. She bought us the bedspreads she thought would work best for our house, which I appreciate.
Ultimately, we paid $600 for items to stage the house. Besides the items mentioned above, we bought lamps, a coffee table, an end table, and household plants.
Our realtor recommended that we hire a landscaper and a window cleaner. Both services felt like an extravagance to my husband and me, but in the end, we ran out of time to do all that needed to be done ourselves.
I consulted Angi and hired a landscaping service that came out the day I called to offer an estimate and two days later to trim our bushes and turn over our yard (which is comprised entirely of rocks because we live in a dry, desert climate). Their work made the yard look much fresher than we could have done ourselves.
The window company charged $279 to wash the windows inside and out, clean all of the screens, and clean the trim and the window tracks. This service felt extravagant, but what a huge difference! The realtor assured us that having the windows professionally cleaned would make our house look amazing, especially when people looked from the kitchen and living room out to the backyard mountain views, and she was right. That was money well spent.
Our experience prepping our house for sale was more work than I could have imagined. However, our realtor provided solid guidance, and after three days on the market, we had five offers. We ended up going with the highest offer, which was $11,000 over asking. The buyer waved inspection, appraisal, and repairs and offered an earnest payment of six percent of the purchase. We’ll close in less than three weeks.
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Recently, you’ve likely heard many pundits express concern that we may be heading into a recession. As the Fed increases interest rates to attempt to stop high inflation, many people worry that the housing market slow down will help tip us into darker economic times. While my husband and I live frugally, we’re preparing our budget for a recession by making some financial decisions we wouldn’t make if the interest rates were lower.
Some couples can’t spend too much time together, or they fight. These couples happily spend all day apart and then enjoy spending time with one another in the evenings and on the weekend. Other couples work well together and complement one another. Some of these couples use their strong relationship skills to propel themselves into successful careers working with one another. If you’re one of the latter couples, you may benefit from career combinations for couples.
For the last couple of years, my husband has been interested in finding a new job. Between the two of us, we’ve developed a system that helps us decide if a job move is worthwhile. Ruling out a job listing in the beginning, before he even applies, saves us time if it isn’t a good fit.
We’re luckier than many couples in that I work from home, so I can move anywhere. If you would need to consider both you and your partner’s jobs and locale, your situation would be more complicated than ours.
We have a number of factors when deciding if my husband should apply for a job out of state.
We start with an initial dig into the area where the job is located.
Since we’re in a low cost of living area, our first item to research is the cost of living where the new job is located. If it’s too expensive, we wouldn’t be able to afford the area. My husband has found job listings in Oregon and Seattle, Washington. However, we ultimately decided not to apply for those because the locales were too expensive.
We’ve spent the last eight years living over 2,000 miles away from family. However, now that my mom is getting older, as are all my aunts and uncles, we decided we’d like to be closer to home. Ideally, we didn’t want to be more than 700 miles away from where all of my relatives live. That narrowed his job search quite a bit, though there were still plenty of jobs to apply for.
Even a decade ago, we didn’t think much about the political landscape when determining where we would like to live. Now, unfortunately, neither of us can imagine moving into an area where most residents have polar opposite political views to ours. Because of this, we had several states that we had no interest in applying for, no matter how good the job.
Once we’ve decided if the area is a good fit for us, my husband then researches the job.
He looks closely at the employer’s reputation. Since he works in a specialized field, he confirms if the position would allow him to do all aspects of his job. (Surprisingly, many jobs get weeded out at this point because they don’t have what he needs to do his research.)
If the company looks good, he digs into the online presence of the people he would potentially work with to see if they could collaborate on research.
If I’ve done my research on the location, and he’s done his research on the company and employees, and we both agree it looks like a good fit, he applies for the job. Surprisingly, we decide a job is not worthwhile to apply for about seventy percent of the time. The other thirty percent of the time, he applies. This strategy has landed him interviews with eight different companies over the last 18 months.
If you’re part of a DINKs couple looking for an out-of-state job, having a system for researching the area and the job itself can help you agree on whether a job is worth pursuing. Over the last 18 months, we’ve perfected how we decide if a move is worthwhile, which saves us time by not applying for a job that isn’t the best fit.
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