How We Paid Cash for Our First Home
Bagaimana Kami Membayar Rumah Pertama Kami Dengan Tunai
dari Get Rich Slowly - Personal Finance That Makes Sense. oleh J.D. Roth
When my husband and I got married nine years ago, we had an audacious dream of paying cash for our first home (9 tahun lalu mereka sudah ada goal untuk membeli rumah dengan cash). At that time, it was very much a far-off dream — we were just trying to survive the rigors and expenses of law school without going in debt (mereka mencuba untuk menghabiskan course undang-undang tanpa hutang. That alone was a seemingly gigantic feat.
But after three years of law school, my husband did graduate without debt (lulus tanpa ada sebarang hutang), passed the bar, and we started planning for the future. Since we’d been renting (menyewa [mesti kadar yang murah]) for almost four years, my husband had a good job, and our second baby was on the way, pretty much everyone expected that buying a house would be in our immediate future.
I mean, after all, isn’t buying a house the responsible thing for a young couple to do? Well, maybe — or maybe not. We didn’t have much money in savings (tidak mempunyai banyak simpanan [tapi berapa banyak simpanan yang mereka ada, kita tidak tahu]) , and we weren’t sure how long we would be living in the town we were in, so we chose to go against conventional wisdom and continued renting (mereka tetap menyewa, menolak cara kebiasaan orang lain iaitu untuk terus membeli rumah).
Setting a goal
Within the next six months, my husband lost his job (mendapat musibah iaitu kehilangan kerja , ujian pertama), we relocated to another city so he could find work (membuat penyelesaian iaitu berpindah dari kawasan lama kepada kawasan baru untuk mencari pekerjaan), I had some significant health problems in my pregnancy which resulted in numerous hospital and doctor’s bills, and we had our second baby (mengalami pelbagai kos-kos perubatan dalam proses mengandung anak kedua [melibatkan kos] ujian kedua). Needless to say, we were incredibly thankful that we hadn’t taken out a mortgage and then had to deal with the headache of trying to sell a house at the last minute — especially since the housing market was poor in our area (bertuah kerana tidak membeli di kawasan yang tidak bagus, akan membawa masalah apabila ingin jual).
It was around this time that we were first introduced to Dave Ramsey (berjumpa dengan seseorang yang bernama Dave Ramsey [bagus berjumpa dengan orang yang betul2 pakar sebagai penasihat]). While we didn’t have any debt and had always lived on a strict budget, going through his Financial Peace University Class fired us (mendapat semangat apabila hadiri kelas-kelas [ini bagus untuk memberi motivasi dan mengetahui jalan-jalan yang ada untuk mencapai impian])up to set big financial goals and work hard to accomplish them (fokus kepada impian dan bekerja dengan kuat untuk mencapainya).
One of the big goals we decided to aim for was paying cash for our first home. We crunched a bunch of numbers and realized that, if we continued to live simply and frugally and worked hard to bring in extra money through side jobs, we could save enough over the course of five years to pay cash for a starter home (mereka menyedari untuk mencapai impian, hidup mesti basic dan bekerja dengan bekerja lebih untuk mendapat duit lebih).
It felt like a mammoth goal and we weren’t sure if we could do it, but we decided to go for it anyway. We figured that, even if we didn’t make our goal in five years, we’d at least be a lot closer to it than if we didn’t try at all! (mempunyai semangat yang kuat, walaupun beranggapan impian itu adalah mustahil tetapi mereka mengatakan lebih baik mencuba dari tidak mencuba)Plus, from our calculations, we’d be in a lot better position to wait to buy — even if it took seven years to save up enough for a house — than if we were to go ahead and get 15-year mortgage and pay it off early.
We knew that we could buy a decent starter home in the area where we were planningto move for around $100,000 to $110,000, so we divided $100,000 by 60 (since there are sixty months in five years) and set a goal to save $1700 every month (mereka membuat kira-kira untuk mencapai harga rumah yang mereka ingin beli, membahagi kepada harga tersebut kepada 5 tahun [dapat amaun untuk sebulan]). Because we didn’t have any debt or school loans, and because we lived simply and frugally, we were able to live on significantly less than we were making, thus freeing up a good chunk of money to put towards our house savings each month (mereka ini tidak terikat dengan mana-mana hutang, jadi segala penat lelah terus boleh pergi kepada mengejar duit simpanan untuk sebulan [ini rahsia kejayaan]).
Gazelle-like intensity
Once we set this goal and I blogged about it publicly, we were incredibly motivated to work as hard as we could and delay every purchase we could in order to put as much as possible into our house savings fund. We used coupons, ate a lot of meatless meals, shopped at thrift stores, cooked from scratch, brown bagged it, continued to use our old and worn-down furniture, didn’t replace anything that wasn’t an absolute necessity, limited our going out to eat, only had one car, stayed home a lot, used gift cards from Swagbucks to buy any non-necessities, bought eye glasses from Zenni optical, learned to be content with what we had, and continued to live on a strict written budget (hidup berdasarkan keperluan semata-mata).
Meanwhile, we also looked for ways to increase our income. I blogged, wrote ebooks, and took on freelance writing jobs. My husband did contract work, started his own law firm, and helped me running the blogging business. (mencari pelbagai sumber kewangan)
That first year, we didn’t always make our monthly savings goals.(tahun pertama tidak dapat mencapai target [tidak patah semangat]) We had some unexpected medical bills and car problems (sebab mereka tidak dapat mencapai target kerana tidak ada dana kecemasan untuk medical dan transport) that ate up a portion of our savings. But we kept plugging away, throwing whatever extra we could squeeze out of our income toward savings. (tetap mencuba pelbagai cara agar target tetap dapat dicapai)
The few years of long hours and hard work we’d put into blogging started to really pay big dividends and by the second year (tahun kedua baru menampakkan hasil apa yang mereka berkerja keras sebelum ini, dapat mencapai target bulanan), we were meeting and exceeding our monthly savings goals every single month. As our house savings fund increased, we began to get so excited (merasa seronok kerana apa yang mereka apply menjadi)that we kind of went overboard and worked long, long hours in order to meet our savings goal even faster. I wouldn’t recommend putting in such long hours, missing so many social events, or sleeping so little, but the effort paid off because, at the end of two and a half years, we paid 100% down on our first home! (dengan meletakkan bekerja lebih masa, kurang bersosial (parti) dan tidur yang sedikit tetapi rasa berbaloi sebab impian dapat lebih cepat)
Even though I wish we had given ourselves a little more breathing room and margin while saving, it was thrilling, fulfilling, and exciting to achieve this goal — in half the time we had initially planned. And we are thankful we chose to take a counter-cultural route and pay cash for our house. Not having a mortgage payment has freed us to continue to save aggressively toward other goals, increase our spending in areas that really matter to us, and give generously to needs in our community and around the world. (bekerja kuat untuk 5 tahun tetapi kesenangan yang berpanjangan - bak kata pepatah beraikt-rakit ke hulu, berenang-renang tepian, bersakit-sakit dahulu, bersenang-senang kemudian)
