I bought a house at 19 with my then boyfriend. We were both working and back then in 2000, it was much less expensive, even though we were buying in CT. My bf was pretty useless but his dad was awesome and combed over the house with me. My mom and I climbed up and inspected the roof - she was a roofer, carpet layer, among other construction-y things. I could have found people to help me, including my mom, of course if I had been on my own, but I wasn't willing to take that debt on my own.
We only lasted two years after buying it and he got it in the divorce, but in those two years we had a lot of expenses and we had savings to take care of them just in case. Two months after we bought it the boiler literally sprung a bunch of leaks when it was less than 10 degrees out. That was fun and 12k. There were a lot of odds n ends. Dishwasher it came with didn't work, not that I cared buy my bf insisted we needed a new one so I picked one up from the Sears scratch and dent place and put that in. The oven didn't work, again, just picked up a middle of the road one and installed it.
I could only imagine what some women would have done. I was raised learning how to do that kind of work, but just some chick off the street would have to be paying people a lot of money for the stuff I was able to do or call my mom and have her walk me through it. I did have to pay a guy to come get rid of the ants, and another to clean out the chimney. I had a septic guy come and poke at the septic just in case and he said even though it was old it was perfectly fine and I likely wouldn't need to talk to him for another 10 years if there were only two of us in the house.
You have to not only have the down payment and the salary to keep up the payments, but money set aside for all the things that just happen. I didn't really want to do it, but felt I had no choice. The debt is staggering to buy a house and you both need to be willing to work on and maintain it. It was hard when all he wanted to do was play video games and demand food at his PC while I was trying to keep the house maintained. Doing it without his help money-wise would have been impossible.
I don't want to be a dick but.. What a tool.
Also bought early, also bought an old house. Majority of the work was done by us, a lot of it by me. Nothing wrong with it. Sure, I like to fuck around and play games but I also like to build stuff.
If you want to buy a "fixer" you need to be willing to do the... fixing.. Or you need to make enough $$$ to pay someone else to do it at a premium.
It didn't need a lot of work. It was all pretty normal stuff. Turns out he wanted me to do everything while he played video games and had a blonde on the side. He "kept me around" because his parents loved me and I'd make a good mom. Even though on our first date I'd told him I was never having kids. He just figured he could "make" me. Sigh. Wasted a lot of time and money on him. I didn't get a lawyer, so got nothing but debt when we divorced. He'd taken out loans and credit cards in my name when I told him I was leaving and racked them up. So fun.
It's really made me debt-shy. I have zero debt and will probably never own a house because I'm too afraid to go into any amount of debt. Plus they are all stupid expensive and probably will be for the foreseeable future.
Ouch, that is rough. Never mind me being sorry but that guy is a dick.
I hope you can get what you want. It is shitty to have someone lie to you about where you want to be in life and just expect you to do what they want "later" because "reasons".
Its more shitty for them to fuck you over with taking out CC's and loans in your name though. That is down right hostile and shitty.
On the other side. You are away from them. That counts for something at least.
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