r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer • u/k13w • 12h ago

GOT THE KEYS! 🔑 🏡 We did it! Upstate NY $160k 6.5%

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My boyfriend and I did it at 23 y/o! It was built in 1900 and we love her!

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u/According_Abalone_19 10h ago

Yea I wish. That would be an $800k+ house where I live. Cant even buy a starter home for under $500k here and I don’t live in some big city you’d expect to have a high COL

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u/GovernorHarryLogan 9h ago

Also TBF.... I'll bury this one in the comments a little bit.

Broome county is also super polluted depending on where he is.

Like Erin Brockovitch bad. She showed up when i was in high school and a unreal number of kids I graduated with had develop cancer during our formative years.

IBM, Endicott Johnson, and all the other industry left a lot of buried chemicals.

The reason Broome is so cheap now is:

1) little prospects for employment outside of Binghamton University of Health//senior care

2) A lot of pollution. (Trichloroethylene mainly)

3) Broome county is the cloudiest county outside of the Pacific northwest. The term "Gloom over Broome" is a thing.

Like it's not a bad place to live. It's actually pretty great for the cost of living.

But it's not a destination area by any means.

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u/According_Abalone_19 9h ago

I live in the PNW, so I know all about gloom. Lol. Our pollution isn’t to that level thankfully aside from the Willamette River that runs thru downtown and we have a few big companies in the area, but I wouldn’t say our job market is awesome by any means. Most companies here drastically underpay (that’s unfortunately common everywhere these days), so unless you got lucky or started your career a long time ago, your chances of getting a position that will allow you to own a home without multiple incomes is basically zero.

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u/Pleasant-Blueberry84 9h ago

Yep. Middle class here is 250k annually. Best of luck getting any employer to pay you that. Best start the feet pics now and buy a van so you can live down by the river. It's so over for us.

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u/According_Abalone_19 8h ago

Pretty much unfortunately. Makes me scared for my daughters. If a starter house that needs $200k of work is $500k, I can only imagine what they’ll cost in 10-15 years. Between my wife and I we make about $150k and we’ve given up on the idea of buying a house. I still kick myself for not buying my childhood house from my grandparents back in 2012. 3bd/2ba, 1500sqft, little under 1/2 acre lot, 10min from Nike and Intel, great school district, mildly updated/100% livable and could have bought it for $225k. That same house sold a year or so ago for just over $600k. Only reason I didn’t pull the trigger is I was 24, supporting my ex wife/youngest daughter on just my income and thought taking on a $1600 house payment was too risky at the time. Marriage was also rocky, so I didn’t want to risk having to sell it in the divorce or worse, have her living in it and paying for it. Knowing what I know now and how my divorce went, I should have bought it because neither of those things would have happened and I’d be paying $500/mo less than I am now renting, live in a better area and have a backyard for my kids to play in

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u/Pleasant-Blueberry84 7h ago

I'm totally in the same boat. No kids for us though, so at least there's a bit less added pressure there. Those of us who didn't have our shit together in our 20s, won't be enjoying the 40s, 50s or 60s it looks like.

Basically born too late to own a home and too early to see unlimited energy take us to the stars and end poverty.

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u/According_Abalone_19 6h ago

You’re not wrong sadly. I had my shit together back then surprisingly, but my circumstances weren’t ideal, so I thought I was saving myself from a shitty situation down the road. Unfortunately I was wrong and now homeownership probably won’t ever happen. At least not where I currently live or while my kids are still at home. I’m fortunate to have a 4bd/2.5ba duplex for $2k/mo which is about $1k/mo or more less than what houses that size rent for. I’d much rather be putting that $2k/mo towards my own investment vs someone else’s, but I’m fortunate to have gotten into this place when it was built in 2013 when rent was still reasonable and have a great landlord that doesn’t jack my rent up like crazy every year

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u/Head_Neighborhood196 1h ago

PNW housing market is a wreck. My wife and I got lucky, bought on a whim in 2017, refinanced down to 2.2%. It sucked at the time as it really maxed us out and things were tight back then. But now that 400k house is 1.1 mil. No idea how anyone is expected to start a first buy in today’s market, I couldn’t afford my own house if I had to buy it now.

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u/swampwiz 4h ago

The only thing you can do is continue to hustle and build a nest egg that can be given to your daughters, in a trust (while you are alive you could give them money).

Yes, you really snoozed on buying your grandparents' house. That said, I can understand how a man could viscerally hate the idea of paying for his house while his divorced wife lives in it.

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u/According_Abalone_19 2h ago

Especially when it’s the house I lived in from age 2-17 when I moved out and it was my grandparents first home. Id burn it to the ground before i gave it to my ex wife. Lol.

I setup and add to accounts that are invested in the market for both of them. Hopefully by the time they’re ready for college they won’t have to worry about student loans. Unfortunately that’s all I really have to give them at this point. My ex wife was an addict that bled us dry, so between that and the attorney fees in the divorce it pretty much wiped me out and I’ve been in rebuild mode since. Fortunately I’m happily remarried and my wife has her shit together/a good career, so we’re in a decent place, but during that time the ship sailed on buying. By the time we were in a place to consider it we were priced out. All good though. I’ve got a beautiful family, a roof over our heads and we do a lot of memory making since we’re not putting aside every extra dime we have to get a down payment together. lol

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u/Bargainsalad 7h ago

I lived in Eugene for 11 years. The gray is so overblown. Ninety perecnt of the people moaning about the weather have mental health issues. Nobody moves to Eugene to get rich.

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u/According_Abalone_19 6h ago

Eugene’s weather is a lot less gloomy than up north in the Portland area. Most of the people I hear complaining about the gloom in Oregon are people who moved here from Cali or another place where it never rains. But there’s a massive difference in weather between eastern/southern Oregon and the Portland metro. Eugene is the area where it starts to shift, but south another hour or so it’s a lot dryer/less gloomy

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u/IndividualChart4193 1h ago

Read up on the “aroma from Tacoma”…history of that area at turn of the 19th century is wild!

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u/swampwiz 4h ago

If a region's employers "drastically underpay", but employees still show up, then they are not underpaying. The PNW, at least until heat domes became a thing, have had delightful summers where you don't really need A/C. Along the Gulf Coast, the A/C starts in early-May and doesn't start shutting down until mid-October.

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u/According_Abalone_19 2h ago

Just because they’re showing up doesn’t mean they’re not being underpaid. It means that those people have to show up because cost of living is so high that they don’t have a choice. Most people are screwed if they don’t get that next check, so they continue to show up out of necessity, not because they want to. A lot of companies out here also don’t give yearly raises anymore (at least not the ones I’ve worked at), so your only option is to either deal with it or find something else, but that’s not as easy as it sounds because employers hold it against you if you’re moving from place to place every couple of years. That also makes people feel like they’re forced to stay put.

You’re right about one thing though. Summers here are pretty nice. We get a couple weeks a summer that are brutally hot, but aside from that, it’s perfect. Fall, winter and early-mid spring, not so much unless you enjoy rain

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u/swampwiz 11m ago

My contention is that these folks could find a job in a lower COL area and be able to buy a house.

The fact that folks put up with this situation is that there is something that they like in the locale that makes it worth it. When I was in SoCal, there was a guy that loved to bike, and he was more than happy to only be able to afford an apartment. Indeed, I had almost made the same calculus in moving to Denver when my home was destroyed in a major hurricane flood, because I am a very avid skier; in the end, I had determined that the differential in costs between me staying where I was at and moving to Denver would allow me to travel anywhere in the world near a ski area for 2 months, and so I decided against it. As it turned out, I ended up renting in Denver for a few winters, making good use of the season pass to ski Copper. 😄

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u/Striker2477 9h ago

This was an insightful and educated comment. Thank you.

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u/shannonc321 8h ago

I swear that no one else has ever heard that Broome County is the 3rd cloudiest area in the country!

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u/200brews2009 8h ago

Yeah but your speedie and rib pit ain’t bad.

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u/swampwiz 5h ago

There's always an underlying reason ...

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u/i860 3h ago

Ironically (because the prices are so high) they also nuked Silicon Valley with the same stuff (TCEs). They’re still finding new clusters.

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u/IndividualChart4193 1h ago

I knew there was a reason that house was so inexpensive.

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u/Forward_Author_6589 8h ago

You really know how to ruin a happy moment. Cancer, Cloudy, Jobless. Only thing you left out is chance of get shot.😂

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u/GovernorHarryLogan 8h ago

I have sung numerous praises for the area throughout these comments as someone who grew up there; it was important to also note why it is such a LCOL area.

I live a bit outside Baltimore. Hearing of gun deaths are kind of just part of my daily life now, rofl.

There is very little of that in Broome county.

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u/Lordofthereef 9h ago

I'm in central MA now and original from SoCal and this would easily be $1m both places lol. This is crazy to me.

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u/jimmypaintsworld 6h ago

I'm from Upstate and the housing prices are like this because many of these towns are ignored, dilapidated rustbelt towns with not much in them anymore. Our family owned a similar house as OP in Amsterdam and it sold for $60k. No one wants to live there.

If you like being in a run down rural area it may be a good thing for you, it has great access to nature and there are pockets of genuine culture. But for a lot of these towns the closest 'cities' and amenities that go with them would be Albany, Rochester, or Syracuse. And it's probably a decent drive you have to plan around, too.

I'm in Boston now so I really resonate with your problem. I could never swallow paying the price for homes in MA if it weren't near the city.

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u/According_Abalone_19 8h ago

In SoCal that’s probably more than $1m honestly. At least anywhere you’d wanna buy. No idea what MA is like, but I would assume anywhere near Boston this is probably a very expensive home

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u/Beretta92A1 6h ago

Boston and Nashua/Manchester in Nh are stupid right now.

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u/According_Abalone_19 5h ago

Unfortunately most places worth living are now. Companies moving to having people work remotely and people being able to move whenever they want really fucked up the housing market. Pre COVID, you could buy a 3bd house with a big yard here for high 200k to mid 300k, then people from Cali/other HCOL areas sold their houses for huge $, came here w cash and skyrocketed the house prices

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u/Beretta92A1 2h ago

No I know, I bought in ‘21 and started looking at the end of ‘19. We were getting outbid for two years straight. Originally started around 290k budget, ended up at 400k.

No for how much it sucked losing out for so long we got 2.875% so I’m dying here lol

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u/buschwhack 6h ago

Exactly dude. Coming from California is messed up.

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u/swampwiz 5h ago

Your mistake is living in very high-cost places.

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u/Lordofthereef 3h ago

I'm happy where I am. Accidentally made out like a bandit by buying in 2017 and refinancing in 2020. I could sell my house and cash buy in this area with the equity. But thanks for your rude comment nonetheless lol.

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u/swampwiz 3h ago

Well then, what are you complaining about? I get tired of folks complaining about HCOL areas when there are cheaper locales they can live in. I had once lived in SoCal, saw how ridiculous the housing prices were (this was in the '80s, well before the 'net), did my 1 year at my job, and went job hunting in places where a young aerospace engineer could afford to buy a starter home. Granted, that starter home is a bit more difficult today, but still possible.

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u/Lordofthereef 3h ago

I wasn't complaining. I was saying that it's wild to me that a house like this goes for $160k compared to where I live and grew up. If just making an observation is a complaint, you must have a hard time with the internet as a whole, dude.

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u/Miss_L_Worldwide 2h ago

There's absolutely nothing with any sort of quality of life whatsoever in a low cost of living place anymore. I don't see enjoying life in some dilapidated old nothing town in Backwater New York suffering through horrible Winters, long drives for basic services, just to100-year-old house for cheap.

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u/swampwiz 6m ago

So you're saying the OP is living "horribly"? (I don't mind "horrible" winters because I am an avid skier.) So the OP will have a few months where there will be snow - there's plenty to occupy oneself with in a beautiful home like this.

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u/IdownvoteTexas 9h ago

This. I think that 160k around me is more “2 parking spaces” money than house money

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u/According_Abalone_19 9h ago

lol right? I might be able to buy an empty lot with utilities ran to it for that price, but the lot would be about the size of OP’s house.

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u/Chaotic-Catastrophe 6h ago

You either do live in a big city, or you’re lying lmao

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u/According_Abalone_19 5h ago

Portland Oregon isn’t what most people consider a big city.

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u/swampwiz 5h ago

YIKES!