Financial Freedom: Selling Our Dream Home

An update on our Debt Free Journey

For the past year and a half, my husband and I have been on a mission towards financial freedom! From February 2020-March 2021, we paid off almost $7,000 in credit card debt – for months I worked two jobs (totaling 60 hours a week), my husband worked overtime every week, and we made sacrifices with our finances. When we made the final credit card payments, the amount of relief and thankfulness we felt wash over us was indescribable. Finally, over a year of hard working and walking in obedience with God paid off and we were credit card debt free.

But, paying off our credit cards left us with one big question – WHAT NEXT?

We decided that next we would start on our car loans – which between my husband’s vehicle and mine, totals about $25,000. We would start on his first because it was older and was 1/3 of the amount of my car loan – so it just made sense! We took a few months off from paying on the loans this past spring, because life happens and we had other expenses. During those few months, we started having an absolutely crazy idea: selling our dream home.

It was an idea that I honestly couldn’t get out of my mind – I was thinking about it often, and more so praying about it often. It was as if God really wouldn’t let me forget about it, honestly! I shared with my husband what I had been thinking and to say he was a little shocked would be an understatement. As everyone knows, the real estate market has exploded over the past year – and for that reason alone our house had shot up dramatically in value, even just since we bought it almost 2 years ago. In addition to the current market, we have done quite a bit of work on our house and our property, so that too has dramatically increased its value. We began thinking, if we can make a small profit off selling our home, we could pay off the rest of our debt, and hopefully put money away to pay for a house in CASH in the future – something we have always dreamed about, but felt it wasn’t practical for us.

Now, we weren’t considering selling based of the financial gain and debt free goals alone – a huge reason had to do with our commute to the Bath/Brunswick area many, many times a week. My husband works in Brunswick, and the Church we’re a part of is in Bath. The amount of money we’re spending on gas every week is insane, and the time spent driving is equally crazy – so moving closer seemed like a no-brainer, especially as we become more and more involved in our Church and have more commitments throughout the week in Bath.

So, that coupled with the equity we knew we had in the house – we decided to at least meet with our Realtor to see what he had to say and if our thoughts on the market and our home value was correct. We were really excited, but trying not to get our hopes up at the same time.

On the drive to meet my husband in Augusta to meet with him (our Realtor), I was praying over the whole situation and asking the Lord to calm my anxious heart – all I could think is, what if the house isn’t worth what we think it is? Where would we live? Would we find an apartment in time? Could we let go of our “dream home” to achieve the financial freedom God has put on our heart?

In the middle of the questions, I felt God whisper to my heart “I’m going to do it again”.

Now, if you’ve been following along with our story since 2019, you may know what this means. If not, I’ll give you a somewhat short answer – in the summer of 2019, during our preparation to head to Haiti on a missions trip, and during our second miscarriage, God told us to buy our house. We were broke, no money saved to even attempt to buy, and we were only 19 and 21 at the time. God THREW OPEN the doors and provided in the most unimaginable ways. Nothing short of a miracle. In the middle of our mess, He made a way when there was no way. The closing costs on our home were at the State limit (around $9,500) and we only paid $18 at closing. To this day, I still can’t believe it happened when I reflect back on it all.

So now “I’m going to do it again” should make a little more sense. I knew then that God was going to do it again, He was going to make a way and we were going to be totally reliant on Him through the whole process.

Less than an hour after God spoke this to my heart, we were sitting in our Realtor’s office as he told us that our house had literally doubled in value since we had bought it in August of 2019 and this was and EXCELLENT time to sell! We were shocked and excited to say the least! Our Realtor wanted to get it on the market ASAP and planned to come out to our house early the next week, right after the 4th of July weekend.

On July 8th, our home officially hit the market and as of today, July 29th, we have had 6 showings and no offers yet. We have low ceilings upstairs and a pretty “interesting” 3rd bedroom as far as layout goes, so we know it is going to take the right people to come along and love the home like we do. However, all the feedback we have gotten from the showings has been positive! Tomorrow morning we have our 7th showing, and just like every one before, we are hopeful that an offer will come from it.

But if not, we trust His perfect timing and know He is going to do it again.

It’s been hard to let go of materialistic things, like a house, but we know that the financial freedom that will come from this decision is going to be incredible. Our plan is the take the profit from our house and pay off our car loans immediately and any remaining debt we have, create a large savings/emergency fund, and then save the remainder to, Lord willing, pay CASH for another house in 3-5 years once we have enough saved.

Hopefully soon I will be writing a blog post about being under contract and apartment hunting, so stay tuned!