Last year I was in your shoes, wanting to buy a house so badly and having people $*% all over my dreams. There was this crazy thing going on with DH's work where they were possibly going to close and move their work far, far away. Every time we looked at a house, he was near the edge of being laid off. I was ready to rush to buy a house in case he lost his job (otherwise we'd have to wait a whole year from finding a new job to be approved for a mortgage AND we lived an hour apart for over a year, incredibly frustrating!!!) and people thought we were crazy. We knew if we bought in a certain price range we'd still be able to afford mortgage etc with some left over even if DH was on unemployment. And I was working a crappy job so that gave us more space too. We had faith that it would all work out but we went bare bones to be on the safe side.
The house we ended up buying is LOVELY. It's been almost a year and I still have moments of "I can't believe this is real!" and stare off dreamily into space. NO REGRETS. And, DH never lost his job.
By the time we found OUR house, we were getting good at this. We had narrowed down our search area, decided on a budget (with wiggle room!) and had money set aside for 5% down and closing costs.
Our house is in a great location, in the country, private, close to DH's work, has the land we wanted for gardening etc. (1/3 of an acre which doesn't sound like much but feels bigger because of shape and being surrounded by woods and fields).
It's a fixer upper, we're doing most of the work ourselves. We had close to 0 knowledge but do a lot of research before getting into major projects and seem to be doing fine so far! We have built a bathroom from scratch, built some dividing walls, insulated, DH did all the plumbing(!), painted, bought most of our furniture from thrift shops and refinished it. Right now we're in the middle of gutting a 12x14' addition that was poorly built. DH works, I stay at home (and I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty or use power tools!) and we do renovations on weekends. We did renos from Oct-Dec last year then took a break from
major work until June.
We have this ongoing list of what needs to be done and order of importance. Insulation is MAJOR and we're working away at that in stages. Next year we'll be insulating from the outside and putting up siding. We knew ahead of time that our heating bill would be expensive. We heat with electric baseboard heaters (common around here) and during the coldest week we were averaging 142kwh. That is an incredible amount!!! And we were keeping our heat at 18C downstairs, 15C upstairs. We're billed every two months and our highest was $525/2mths. This summer? We had a bill for $89/2mths.
How do we afford repairs? We have a $5000 line of credit that we use, pay off, use, pay off. Right now we choose to put most of our money into the house but in a couple of years after most of the work is done we'll have quite a bit of money left over each month! And we only had a 15 year mortgage! One year down, fourteen to go!
I just wanted to share my story to show that yes, having a house can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be as wild as some people say. If you do a lot of the work yourselves and skip the granite counter tops, it's affordable!
After saying all that, I would look for option 3. Something in the middle of what you're looking at. I think that having that 15,000 will help you out quit a bit and an extra $50,000 in 5 years would be such a blessing! I totally get why you want to buy a house, sometimes life where you are sucks so bad, you just want to get away already! Being told to wait is heartbreaking! Keep looking and good luck!
My final advice is to buy at the bottom of what banks will lend you, keep plenty of room in the budget for extras, and start a savings account for any repairs that might pop up suddenly. Have your house inspected so that you know what you're getting into.
