My quest for a bad little house
I really want to own a home. I want a place where I get to be the one who says "sure, sleep over." I want to be able to take people in if they need it and I want to have a cozy landing-pad in the world.
I've been saving up. I've been working hard, squirreling away my stipend while running a small business on the side. I paid off my student loans last November and now I have a heap of cash that's just about down-payment-sized. "I'm ready now," I thought to myself.
"Stipends don't count as income," said the mortgage companies. "Technically, you're unemployed, and since your business isn't registered as an LLC it doesn't help. Registering it now won't help either, because it won't establish the kind of history we're looking for."
I switched gears and went to my university's affiliated credit union for a personal loan. "I might not be able to afford a NICE house with a personal loan," I thought, "but if I put it together with my savings, I can get a bad, little house. With enough hard work it might become less bad over time, and perhaps even less little."
"We don't recognize student loans as credit history," said the credit union. "You're not eligible for a personal loan because you've only had a credit card for like three months, so even though you have excellent credit and no debt and never made a late payment on your student loan, it's not enough." This is a university-affiliated credit union, I say again. This probably hits a lot of their potential members. I'm truly disgusted.
If I see another thinkpiece mocking or castigating millennials for not buying houses etc, I'm going to be seriously angry. I'm thinking about where I could publish a counter-thinkpiece about this now, in fact. I mean, it's not like I could have done this differently. I applied for a credit card right out of college, and I wasn't able to get one because I didn't have enough income and I didn't have any credit history. It's exactly like those "entry-level" jobs that prefer at least three years of experience.
I've done everything I can. I'm doing it as correctly as I can. It's not good enough. I just want a bad little house and I can't even have that. I asked for less money than most people drop on a wedding, and they wouldn't lend it to me, a person who paid off a student loan in less than half the projected time.
Their loss. I'm going to make a cash offer on that house with the cash I've got in my literal pocket, and if it works it works, and if it doesn't I guess I'm looking for a new sublet where I can save up even more cash until it does.
I will get there.