Dear family,
I am writing this letter from my new couch in my new house! It feels good to live in Provo again. Or maybe it just feels good to be in this place that I’ve known for a while was mine and now has furniture that makes it look inhabited. Either way, I’m happy.
Both I and Dad have mentioned that Luke and I were working on purchasing a house. Well, this month, it actually happened! We had been e-signing various e-documents over the course of April, and to finish up the process, we got to go into an actual office (one of those nice ones that has chips on the table in the waiting area and offers you any beverage you could possibly imagine even though you could theoretically get up and leave any time you wanted) and sign more documents with real live pens. It was thrilling.
The closing on the house (as I believe we call it) was a surprisingly tender experience. Not only did our real estate agent come, but so did our lender—a classmate of Luke’s—and our real estate agent’s business partner. It was a whole party. They gave us presents, they made jokes about “yes, but couldn’t it count as paying tithing if we just…” (something finance people in Utah seem to enjoy talking about like it’s one of life’s great philosophical quandaries), and then they witnessed the signing of our will. Because why not when you’ve already got a notary just sitting there.
And she was a lovely notary. I don’t have a ton experience with notarizing (or with buying a house, come to think of it), but there have been few people throughout this whole process that have been focused on me. She seemed to be talking to me more than anybody else. She maintained eye contact with me, explained terms and documents to me without me having to ask, and acted as though I was just as savvy as my husband for buying a house so early on in our lives.
She, more than anyone else, made me feel like I was just as involved in the process as Luke. Other than Luke himself, of course.
Luke has been very good about including me in both his language and the decisions involved in the house-hunting affair, even during times when I didn’t really want any part in it. Obviously, I never completely disapproved of the plan, but when he moved from talking about how it makes no financial sense to buy a house in Utah rather than rent to instead touting house-hacking as a key and ever-depreciating opportunity the longer it went untapped—well, I was concerned and a little blind-sided.
But even when he was the one going to most of the house tours, finding a lender, and making spreadsheets to calculate the possibility of return on investment in twenty years, he still always told people, “Yeah, Sophie and I are getting close to buying house!” It was something I felt I had to do better, because any time I told a friend about it, I’d probably sound a little embarrassed and say, “Luke is really into the idea of buying a house these days.” Because we’re not even twenty-five yet! It just felt ridiculous to me for a little while. I’ve never been in debt before, I never knew what questions to ask our real estate agent, and our lender ended up leaving my income out of the equation to determine whether we qualified for a loan because I’ve changed jobs so many times in the past few years. This last thing was completely reasonable and we qualified using just Luke’s income, but it was just one more thing that made me feel a little obsolete in the whole process.
But, like I said, Luke was consulting me the whole way through. And our notary made me feel included with her persistent eye contact.
I was a little scared going into this closing because a) we were making a very large financial decision that would largely impact the next phase of our lives, and b) my name has legally changed since the first time I e-signed one of these important house-related documents.
Everyone involved was largely unconcerned about the fact that I would be signing a bunch of documents with a name that isn’t technically mine anymore, but still unsure enough that I thought something terrible might just happen. They said, “Just bring two valid forms of ID for both of your names.” So I carried around just about everything that allows the US government to view me as a real person in my backpack that day, hoping that no one would decide to mug me.
Fortunately, all of the papers we had to sign had my maiden name on them (except for the one that didn’t, but we fixed it up nice and quick) and we were in and out in no time at all.
It was kind of like getting married again, you know? You go into a specific building at a specific time for an appointment that you feel like you really shouldn’t be late for. Then you come out feeling largely the same but you know that something is actually quite different. Last time it was the feeling that I could now file taxes jointly, but this time, it was the crushing weight of debt, paired with the freedom of never having to wait on unreliable management because I’m responsible for fixing all of my own problems now.
One of the funniest things about the place where we closed on our house was that they had these little signs with different celebratory phrases on them. We didn’t hold any in our pictures because Luke feels he’s too cool for them (which he probably is), but our favorite was the one that said, “Goodbye, Rent!”
As if we’ve ever had to pay as much to live anywhere as we’re going to be paying for the rest of our lives.
Now we own a house. We were able to find a tenant for the downstairs unit quickly and he’s lovely. We don’t think there will be any problems. We only just moved into the place ourselves this past Saturday, with the help of Luke’s grandparents (and their truck) and some dear friends, almost all of whom were from the east coast, because those are the people we prefer to enlist into our service.
Luke and I have become better at using Facebook marketplace this week, as a result of suddenly needing a couch, an entertainment center, and a kitchen table. Luke loves messaging people who really just want to get rid of their large furniture but also want a quick hundred dollars from chumps who really want a couch or just something to eat on. What he loves about this is not finding good deals necessarily, but making his own good deals by haggling in the one place in America where it is still socially acceptable to haggle.
Despite having served a mission in Ukraine, I am not a haggler. I’ll pay whatever someone asks me to, or I won’t buy the thing. This is why I almost cried every time Luke told me to go onto Facebook marketplace and offer thirty percent of the asking price for every piece of furniture I found that I even kind of liked. Thirty percent! Do you know how much of a toerag I felt like, offering thirty dollars for an entire couch?
But, like with most things, Luke really does have the right idea with the used furniture market in the end. Since most people became desperate enough to give away their couch for free if no one was willing to pay for it by the time they needed it gone, we did end up getting a couch for about 50% of its already seriously discounted asking price.
And that’s how we got all of our large furniture for $115 dollars total.
After messaging people about renting our basement and low-balling every person with a used couch in Utah county, I really hope I don’t have to look at Facebook marketplace again for a long time. As Luke will tell you, I consider it a very stressful place.
Another thing that caused me considerable distress this month: the job search.
It’s been a long and ongoing saga that I think I am now finished with until I have to find a real teaching job after I complete my undergrad in December. But here are the stats for this year’s summer job search:
Number of jobs applied to: 8
Number of interviews: 6
Number of job offers: 4
Number of these jobs I took: 0
Not bad averages if I may say so. Except for the last one, I suppose.
Now I’m back at the BYU Print and Mail for the summer. It turns out that my schedule just doesn’t work for a lot of the available teaching-related jobs right now, especially since I am picky enough to turn down jobs that would never allow me to see Luke before 10 PM every day. I even got hired as an MTC teacher the other week before I pointed out to them that the days I had put on my application as days I would be unavailable were considered mandatory training days that I could not miss.
They said I could instead start on July 7th. I told them (again, subtly referencing my unavailable days on my application) that I would be at Young Women’s camp that day.
So anyway, that’s how I turned down working at the MTC, even though it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a year or two now. Oh well. The bindery has always been good to me and took me back without a second thought, even allowing me to keep the pay that I had worked up to by the time I left. Standing in one place for eight hours does kind of make my back twinge and my neck ache, but it’s a good place to work.
Luckily, both Luke and I still have jobs that always give us national holidays off, which meant that we were able to drive down to Phoenix, Arizona for Memorial Day weekend to visit his Uncle Tyler and his lovely family!
We realize, of course, that summer is really not the best time of year to visit Arizona. We also realize that February is not the best time to drive to Colorado. But we figured since we’d already made the latter decision that the former was already decided for us and that such a choice, while perhaps unpleasant to our sweat glands, could not possibly be as dangerous or frightening as our Colorado trip.
And we were completely right! The only thing I had to fear was upsetting a small child by accidentally breaking the family roomba, which I felt fairly confident in my ability to avoid doing.
And boy, does that boy love the family roomba. Or rather, “beep boop,” as the roomba has been dubbed in the Phoenix Wonnacott household. If Tyler and Kristin’s youngest child was ever upset, he could likely be appeased by letting beep boop free to rove the kitchen and do whatever it is he does.
While there, we watched The Wild Robot (a killer movie featuring one of the largest beep boops a child could hope for…and yet still not as compelling as watching the domestic robot complete tasks right in front of your very eyes) and A Minecraft Movie, which I’m told had already had a few showings in the house earlier in the day, but the kids wanted to watch it with us.
It was honestly the perfect weekend for us. Luke had his wishes to travel and see family fulfilled, while I got to hang out with little kids and watch little-kid movies. The perfect blend of the two different ways we prefer to take advantage of three-day weekends.
Luke and I also had our first golfing experience with Uncle Tyler that weekend,
Luke wants to learn to play golf so that he can be like every other finance man and make deals on the greens while making double bogey on 16/18 holes, bogey on the other two. At least, that’s about what the two random guys who played with Luke and Tyler were making down in Sun City. Luke seemed to do decently for his first time playing.
I stayed in my golf cart.
Golf with Tyler has sparked a much more diligent pursuit of the sport than either of us had previously tried. We’ve gone to the driving range twice together, putting to use the set of clubs that Luke got on Offer Up—a place where Luke acts very similarly to how he does on Facebook Marketplace—for forty dollars. I come along because I want to spend time with my husband. And it’s pretty fun.
I struggle sometimes with things that are commonly associated with wealth. I largely attribute this aversion to my beginnings in Montgomery County, Maryland, where it’s really kind of embarrassing to appear rich. At least in the Down County Consortium (DCC) where my school was located. Of course, it was probably also embarrassing to appear poor, but no one would ever call you on that (at least, not in my circles). It’s only cool to make fun of rich people.
I wouldn’t say my family was rich growing up, but we certainly never worried about paying utilities or buying clothes as my siblings and I were growing. And we’re white and had a house with a guest room and space for five bedrooms. So we were rich, and that could at times be embarrassing.
Now, despite the fact that I’m married to a guy in finance and also officially and distinctly not rich according to the government (who might even go so far as to call us poor and give us free money—or well, some of your money, probably), I still fear appearing rich.
Which is why I don’t normally offer the information that we bought a house to friends my age, why I feel a little worried about picking up golf, and why I beg Luke to never buy a Rolex or a Cyber Truck even if we can one day afford those things. I’m pretty sure he’s joking when he talks about one day being rich enough to casually buy those things, but it’s hard to tell sometimes. He does seem serious about buying a Honda Civic Sport “when we’re rich,” and he doesn’t like it when I rag on them in response.
But all of those are mostly jokes about our future once Luke is further into his career, and his definition of rich is about $100,000 a year, which is, of course, great, but probably not Rolex rich.
Something else that probably contributes to my loathing of the idea of having the appearance of money is the fact that I really just hate to spend it. Luke is in charge of buying our groceries because we both know he is the one we can trust to actually buy everything we need. I’d say I’m generally better at remembering what we need, but he actually goes through with the purchasing.
Me, I’ll spend three minutes looking between the honey on the shelf and the word “honey” on my list and eventually decide that we don’t need that because it’s just another form of sugar anyway. We’ve already got sugar.
The most miserable hour of my marriage thus far was probably during the shopping trip we took together to stock our new house with all of the non-perishable items that you can find in a grocery store and imagine yourself wanting for the first few months of living there. We went down every aisle of Walmart and Luke just kept putting things in the cart. Bags and cans and soaps and candles and cleaning supplies and all sorts of things that I knew would make my life better but that I think caused me physical pain to see piling up in the cart.
I don’t know what was wrong with me, but when he asked me to pick out two candles, I just said, “No.” And then I repented and I left to go pick out two candles. Because I put Luke in charge of groceries for a reason, and I need to trust the decisions I made when I was of sound mind (meaning, not in the aisles of a grocery store).
Outside of the grocery store, though, I think I’m becoming a lot smarter with money. Luke talks to me a lot about the investments we’re making, as well as various things he learns while at work as a financial planner. I’m getting better at talking about money, even if I’m still pretty bad at spending it.
One of the most gratifying conversations I had this month was with a consultant at Wells Fargo when I went there to get my name on my accounts changed to my (now entirely legal and) married name. This actually happened on the day we were closing on our house, which I described earlier. I had already had to reveal to the teller at Wells Fargo that my husband and I were planning to close on a house later that day when I was getting a cashier’s check to bring to our closing appointment. The teller saw that we had a decent chunk of money just sitting in our checking account and decided to give the poor girl in front of him some unsolicited advice.
“I notice that you’ve got $XXX just sitting in your checking account right now. Do you normally keep that much there?”
Someone tell me, is it a teller’s job to say stuff like that? Or was he just a helpful little finance major?
I told the teller that we don’t normally keep the bulk of our money in checking; that we had just recently sold a lot of our bonds and stocks because we were closing on our house, later that afternoon as a matter of fact; and that we’d hopefully be building up our portfolio in our brokerage account again soon.
I can’t remember whether he was relieved that I’m not as silly as my bank account made me look or disappointed because I already knew the advice he was planning on giving me. Probably the latter, because he gave the advice anyway, even though I had just reassured him that I know that money isn’t just supposed to sit in a checking account while it loses value by the second (or whatever opportunity cost story it is that they spin in the finance world about the time value of money).
I collected my cashier’s check, thankful that Luke talks so much about money and probably helped prepare me to make that conversation less awkward for me than it could’ve been.
Then, I walked over to a consultant to get my name changed, and he, also very helpfully, decided to engage me in a conversation about my financial goals.
All of these helpful young men at Wells Fargo really wanted to make my stay as long as it possibly could be. I just wanted a cashier’s check and to change my name.
I complain, but both were perfectly pleasant interactions, and I was in no rush. The consultant, after discerning that I and my husband had suitable financial goals for his taste and that our strategies were sound (Luke’s strategy being investing semi-aggressively but keeping everything liquid while we build a solid emergency fund back up, mine being “never spend any money on anything and hope there’s enough when we need it”), also asked whether we normally keep $XXX in our checking account. I told him, no, not usually, we’re just closing on a house later today.
He said, oh so it’ll all be gone soon.
I said, yeah basically.
And he said, then I guess I won’t offer you a nicer savings account with a higher interest rate for people with more money than you actually have.
I said, no, I guess you won’t.
And then he did what I actually came there for him to do and ordered me a new debit card. I left. I drove to the nearest elementary school and picked up half a day of work, because why not, the men at Wells Fargo hadn’t taken up my whole day.
And at this elementary school, I engaged in the school’s Water Party Day, an event that I feel should have been included in the job description. I took a class of second graders outside to run around in the field under sprinklers, have water balloons thrown at them, and be dropped into a dunk tank.
Naturally, by the end of the day, the whole class was miserably cold and impatiently waiting for their turn to change out of their swimsuits in the overflowing school bathrooms. One kid lost his shoe. We never found it.
Then I left the school, picked up Luke from work, and we drove to our appointment to close on our house. I’ve already told you about that.
To wrap up a busy day, we went straight from the closing to our Vineyard place to pick up our brand new lawnmower that we had ordered in the mail, drove to our new house in Provo, and Luke started to mow the lawn while I went to Sam’s Club to buy us a pizza for our first meal in our new home.
We’re comfortable and happy. By now we’ve moved in everything we possess on this side of Gary, Indiana and we’re enjoying our cozy little home.
I hope that all of you are similarly comfortable and happy. Wish us luck as we face the new trials that come with home ownership, and keep us in your prayers.
We’re doing our best to keep you in ours.
Much love,
Sophie
Senior Contributor to The Famlet Monthly