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When I bought my house I was hit with over $1,500 in surprise expenses, but I had the money thanks to a simple piece of advice I followed religiously
The author’s savings strategy changed when she read a piece of advice: Keep your emergency savings separate from your down payment fund.
My husband and I recently bought our first house, a lovely three-bedroom rowhome in Philadelphia. We moved into it in early December after a five-day cross-country road trip from Los Angeles.
If you’ll allow me to pat myself on the back for a moment, I’ll say I think we did a lot of things right money-wise. We bought significantly less house than we can technically afford (meaning our monthly payment is a lot less than what we paid in rent for our apartment in LA), we locked in a mortgage interest rate that’s below 3%, and we negotiated a heck of a deal on the property (including $10,000 towards the cost of rewiring the electrical).
The advice that changed our savings strategy
But one of the smartest things we did, in my humble opinion, was follow a piece of advice I got from my colleague Tanza Loudenback in 2019. In an article that year, Tanza shared the words of financial planner Jill Schlesinger, who said on…
