I know it’s awfully difficult to afford homeownership these days.
My wife and I are living examples of that paradigm.
It was all we could do just to get together enough money for the downpayment on our home. And making ends meet surely hasn’t been easy. It’s all we could do to put food on the table and make sure there was sufficient heating and cooling. That situation was only made worse when the pandemic started. Both my wife and I had to take pretty serious pay cuts in order to keep our jobs. We were lucky to be able to work from the air conditioning safety of our home. But that also meant that our finances went from tough to down right near impossible. We had to zero in on things like the HVAC cooling costs of summer and all sorts of other spending to save money. Actually, we ended up saving hundreds of dollars over the entire heat season of 2020. We were working from home and had the thermostat set in the 80’s. There were fans going all afternoon during the peak heating hours. But we did it and the money we saved ended up going right back to the HVAC company. Right at the end of summer, the HVAC unit had a problem. We even considered getting a handyman type to look at it to save money. But we quickly recognized that has a bad idea. The heating and cooling equipment is just too essential to our home to be trusted to anyone but the HVAC professionals.