the other side of home ownership
When it comes to owning a home, this is what we often don’t talk about. A breakdown of a foundation issue that costed us a whopping $76,000. And the biggest life lesson I will ever learn.
It’s almost too easy to scroll through social media these days and be bombarded by the highlight reels of our lives we choose to share selectively. This is something I’ve been and am guilty of. I am a serial let’s-just-highlight-the-good stuff person. It’s the Chinese immigrant in me - the need to save face (a topic I promise I will delve deeper into). The need to keep up this dance to impress and entertain. At all times. For the past year, I’ve gone to lengths to repress this story.
Well, because, deep down, I felt like a failure. Let’s step back down memory lane for this to make sense.
Around the summer of 2022, I was soaring on cloud nine. I was hitting another financial peak high during the pandemic. I had just finished renovating my first house; it was featured in Domino and Architectural Digest. Although there were only two of us and my cat, Chloe, we felt we were slowly outgrowing the space. Around this time, I decided it might be time to sell. And sell, we did — right at the peak of a real estate frenzy of a market. We sold for top dollar and negotiated a tiny window of time to stay at our just-sold house after selling. But finding a home within 30 days in the ever-fluctuating, high-cost-of-living real estate market of Los Angeles proved to be intensely difficult, even with a decent 20% down payment on a house.
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