Mr. Clever Fox Bought a House

You may have noticed a few months of silence here at Mr. Clever Fox. The reason for that is exciting: I bought a house! I began the house-hunting process at the end of last year, put in an offer in January, and closed in February. Then came the move and the long road towards settling in. As anyone who’s gone through the process knows, buying a house can take over every waking moment (and all too many sleeping moments as well). The home still feels far from “done”, but I’m finally coming up for air and excited to get back to work on the blog. 

Becoming a homeowner has created daily opportunities for financial discipline and clever spending, and I’m excited to share these stories with you! I have a long list of new tips, tricks, experiences, and funny stories from my homeownership projects so far, including making repairs and improvements, acquiring furniture, hiring professional help, and even looking for great deals on the latest smart home gadgets. 

To get things flowing again, I’m excited to announce I’ll be doing a new series of short posts on house-related projects that are bite-size and to the point. Just a few paragraphs on whatever the topic is, hopefully coming out a few times a week. Keep an eye on the blog and look for that to start up later this week. 

For the rest of this post, I’ll share a little more background on my journey these past couple of months, as well as some big-picture financial observations about house buying.

Hunting in a hot market

One of the reasons I moved to Austin a year ago was house prices seemed relatively affordable (compared to similar cities on the west coast), but the market has gone absolutely nuts in the past year. Not a week seems to go by without another news story about Austin’s booming housing market, fueled by an influx of businesses (and therefore people) moving here and exacerbated by limited numbers of homes available in the core of the city. 

Luckily, we had some great help navigating this crazy market. And it was truly a serendipitous connection: I had started helping people buy electric cars late last year after my own adventure leasing a Chevrolet Bolt. One of the people I helped was a realtor. While helping her buy her car, we began discussing real estate, and ultimately she helped us find a home! As a side note, it was delightful to have a little convoy of EVs come together every time we checked out a house! 

Making an offer

We found the right house in early January and put in an offer. It was a 1960s ranch-style house remodeled “down to the studs” by a flipper. Six months ago, if you had told me I’d wind up buying a home from the 60s, I would have said you were crazy. However, this home had been modernized, had an unusual and exciting floor plan, and was in a great neighborhood.

I quickly learned that the sigh of relief and joy at having the offer accepted would be fleeting as we dove into the inspection process. It is a bit jarring to go from feeling like you’ve found a great home to learning what’s wrong with it, but it’s an important step. Despite the remodel, we discovered a fair number of issues during our inspection. The most significant one was that the old, cast iron sewer line under the slab foundation had rusted and broken apart. This is not uncommon in a house of this age, and it is an expensive repair. But how’s this for a return on investment: A $125 plumbing inspection found the problem during our option period, which allowed us to negotiate $14,000 off the price!

Satisfied with the inspection (despite an extensive list of repairs), we got our financing arranged and bought the home. 

The Move

As you probably know, moving is a busy, stressful process where you really don’t want something to go wrong. Like, oh, I don’t know, a massive snowstorm that cripples the power grid and sends the entire state of Texas into the Dark Ages. Yeah. That one.

In the week leading up to the move, packing suddenly gave way to just trying to survive. We lost power, heat, clean water, and cell service at our rental for days. Meanwhile, the winter weather also delayed that sewer repair I mentioned above, which we’d smartly arranged to have completed before the move. In the end, when moving day came, we drove our U-Haul of possessions over still-defrosting streets, utterly exhausted. And we couldn’t actually live in the house for the first week.

Maintaining discipline

By late February, we were living in the house and starting to make it a home. In addition to unpacking, the process of acquiring furniture and making repairs and improvements began. 

The past couple of months have been a particularly challenging time to be a “clever fox” because of stress, exhaustion, and the sheer number of tasks to tackle. The temptation to buy something new rather than hunt for a used deal, to hire somebody rather than do a repair myself, and to generally “throw money at problems” has been high. 

In the weeks after buying the house, I also observed what I’d call a “calibration problem”. Usually, any purchase over about $100 (and definitely over $1,000) feels major and makes us pause. But with house buying, we’re suddenly talking about an asking price in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the negotiation process and the financing process, figures in the thousands and tens of thousands are thrown about quite casually. It’s easy to become numb and forget that outside of the real estate transaction, saving $100 is significant. And with money flying out of the wallet every day, the amount of money saved by maintaining financial discipline adds up fast.

On that note, stay tuned, as I’ll start getting into specific stories and money-saving tips in my new series of short posts. I hope you enjoyed reading this overview about the whirlwind my life has been these past few months. It’s good to be back!