Paying My Mortgage Is Easy, but This Expense Busts My Budget Every Year

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The worst part? It’s an unavoidable one. 

You’ll often hear that owning a home leads to more financial stability than renting. And a big reason is that when you rent, your housing situation isn’t always as secure.

You never know when your landlord might decide not to renew your lease. Or, they could renew your lease at a much higher rate, thereby effectively forcing you to move to another home — and bear the cost of hauling your belongings from one place to another.

When you own a home, you get to keep living there as long as you continue to pay your mortgage and property taxes. And if you sign a fixed-rate mortgage, you don’t have to worry about your monthly home loan payments increasing over time.

Now, I happen to live in a part of the country where housing is expensive. In spite of that, my monthly mortgage payments are pretty easy for me to manage.

The reason? My husband and I specifically bought a house that was under budget for us, and we made a 50% down payment on our home when we bought it. That, combined with a low mortgage rate we refinanced into in 2020, has left us with monthly home loan payments that fit pretty seamlessly into our budget.

But while we don’t tend to struggle with our mortgage payments, there’s another homeowner expense that trips us up year after year. And it’s an expense we can’t shed.

When home repairs rear their ugly head

When you own a home, it’s not just your mortgage and property taxes you have to worry about paying. You also have to maintain your home and fix things that go wrong.

My husband and I budget regularly for maintenance, since there are different aspects of upkeep we know to expect. But we can’t predict when our air conditioning system might fail or when another appliance might stop working. And we can’t predict when a storm will cause damage to our exterior. As such, even though we do our best to keep our housing costs low, sometimes, we have no choice but to raid our savings when larger repairs come up.

Make sure you’re ready for homeownership

Over the past few years, my husband and I have easily spent around $20,000 on various repairs. Thankfully, we had money in our savings account to tap, and we make a point to maintain a larger emergency fund specifically for the purpose of covering household repairs.

But many people don’t have thousands of dollars in savings. And people in that boat risk racking up scores of debt when home repairs pop up.

That’s why if you’re going to buy a home, it’s important to go in with a pretty robust savings account. And also, it’s important to budget continuously for home repairs, which is something we do in my household.

You may run the numbers and decide you can pretty easily afford the monthly mortgage payment on your home. But if you don’t leave yourself a decent amount of wiggle room to tackle upkeep and repairs, you might end up in a really unpleasant financial situation.

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