Makin’ Plans

TL;DR — My boyfriend and I are makin’ plans to inte­grate our lives togeth­er with the idea being to get mar­ried and start a fam­i­ly in the near-ish future!

Over a year ago, I met the most won­der­ful man in the world and snapped him up to make him mine. Actu­al­ly, he snapped me up. .….Can we have mutu­al snap­page? Deep thoughts to pon­der next to a fire on a cold win­ter night sometime.

Any­ways, we’ve man­aged to weath­er a glob­al pan­dem­ic togeth­er and are still enam­ored with each oth­er. insert doe eyes here I could lit­er­al­ly wax poet­ic about how amaz­ing he is for many blog posts, so you’ll just have to take my word for it unless you want me to bore you to tears with all of his virtues.

So, our log­i­cal next step is to move in togeth­er and fig­ure out if we can deal with the oth­er per­son­’s way of using the tooth­paste tube and all the oth­er lit­tle quirks we all have. I’m not quite sure what that looks like at the moment. My lease just went month to month (or maybe a 6‑month lease that ends in June? I haven’t signed any paper­work that says so but that’s what my land­lord thinks). His lease is up in June as well, so at least that aligns nice­ly. If we don’t find a house to buy before his lease is up, we’ll extend my lease and he’ll move in with me in my cur­rent apart­ment. Any­thing he won’t use imme­di­ate­ly can go in a stor­age unit until we do find a house to buy. If my boyfriend moves in with me, his room­mate will get his own place. If we find a house, his room­mate is wel­come to come with us because.….… we’re look­ing at buy­ing a decent sized house.

This is the part where being a for­mer Mus­tachi­an makes things fun. I do not want to buy the small­est house pos­si­ble. I do not want to buy a prop­er­ty with the inten­tion of mak­ing mon­ey on it. I would like a house that we can live in and stay in for a num­ber of years, which means we are con­cerned about the school dis­tricts. St Louis has some amaz­ing school dis­tricts and some not so great dis­tricts. So, our bud­get for a house.… a house over 1,750 sq ft, is any­where up to $400,000. With a 3 or 4 bed­room house, we’ll have plen­ty of room for us to have a room, each of us to have an office to work from home, and a guest room. Until we start hav­ing kids, and then we’ll have enough rooms to put our clones in once they’re big enough to sleep by themselves.

Logis­tics for the actu­al house pur­chase are com­pli­cat­ed, because of course they are. I don’t do things the easy way. It’s no fun that way. I have the access to the VA loan which means we don’t need a down­pay­ment. He has the mon­ey for a down­pay­ment if we decide to do one. I would like at least 5% just to cut down on the tru­ly absurd amount of inter­est that will accrue on a mort­gage that big. Inter­est rates are so low right now, though, that it does­n’t make sense to pay off the mort­gage ear­ly when that mon­ey could be invest­ed in the mar­ket. Which he needs to do in his retire­ment accounts to catch up for his slow­er start to retire­ment sav­ings. (We set­tled on $400,000 as the PITI will be rough­ly 25% of our com­bined finances.… which is also some­thing we need to fig­ure out the logis­tics of. Good thing I don’t bank account hack and have 25 dif­fer­ent accounts open! That would just make things more confusing.)

“But wait a minute, Gwen.…. did­n’t you already move in with a boyfriend? Did­n’t that not work out? Why will this one be dif­fer­ent?” (Actu­al ques­tion from my fam­i­ly. They don’t think this is the best idea.)

Why yes, I did move in with a past boyfriend and it did not work out. But, I moved into his house. I did­n’t have any say in the house and had no sense of own­er­ship. The house was full of his stuff and we bare­ly used any­thing of mine. (Most of it stayed in boxes.)

This house will be our house. We’re both eager­ly scour­ing the list­ings and debat­ing the pros and cons of var­i­ous fea­tures like sec­ond sto­ries, base­ments, half baths on the first floor for guests, for­mal din­ing rooms and, screened-in porch­es. What­ev­er prop­er­ty we buy will be with the whole-heart­ed approval of the oth­er. It’s so strange and so won­der­ful to be with a part­ner that actu­al­ly lis­tens to me and takes my opin­ions into con­sid­er­a­tion! There have been lots of prop­er­ties out there that would make love­ly homes, so we’re con­fi­dent we’ll be able to find some­thing when we have all of our ducks in a row.

There are a lot of ducks to get in a row before then, though. We need to have a con­sul­ta­tion with a lawyer to get an agree­ment in place on what hap­pens to the prop­er­ty, any mon­ey put into the house, and equi­ty should we break up. I trust him to do the right thing, but I like to cov­er my butt. I think we have an equal amount of risk at stake with him putting in the down­pay­ment and me get­ting the loan. I’m not sure what that looks like yet (like I said above). We might do con­ven­tion­al just so both of us can be on the loan. There might also be a way to get him on a VA loan with me if we put x amount down on a house. We also need to get pre-approved and find a real­tor, so we’ll be stay­ing busy as win­ter turns to spring. I have access to a group legal plan through work, so I need to fig­ure out how that works and if their ser­vices will be help­ful for us. If not, I’m going to stop pay­ing into it. It’s only $10/mo, but that could go towards oth­er things. Like sav­ing for a house.

We’re also fig­ur­ing out the time­line for get­ting engaged/having a wedding/all the things that entails. Covid has thrown a def­i­nite wrench in our time­lines. We haven’t met the fam­i­lies yet and would like to do so before offi­cial­ly putting a ring on it. And, speak­ing of rings, I don’t want a fan­cy dia­mond ring from a jew­el­er. I think it would be fun to hit up all the pawn shops and sec­ond-hand shops in the area to see if we could find a set we like. But nei­ther of us can go out shop­ping now, so that’s anoth­er delay. From my friends that are engaged and try­ing to plan a wed­ding, things in the wed­ding indus­try are back ass­wards right now. Lots of cou­ples pushed back their wed­dings to 2021 or 2022, so we might be com­pet­ing with more cou­ples than nor­mal for a venue and oth­er ven­dors. I’m not opposed to a cour­t­house wed­ding (or even one at the local jail­house like my friend end­ed up hav­ing to do!) at first and then hav­ing a big par­ty when things calm down later.

It looks and feels like 2021 will be a very fun year full of changes and adven­ture with my favorite per­son, and I’m very excit­ed to see what those 365 days will bring for us!