The House My Clients Built: Buying a Home as a Freelancer
Buying your first home can seem intimidating and scary, especially when the news is full of talk of mortgage crisis, and especially when you’re a freelancer without a steady paycheck to rely on. In fact, it can seem downright impossible.
The first time I was looking into buying a home, it was with my boyfriend: a nice, steady, engineer-type with a full-time job. I was freelancing lots of small gigs that added up to a nice income but didn’t look very reliable on paper. But we figured that with his undeniably reliable paycheck, a bank could be persuaded to give the two of us a mortgage.
Well, instead of buying our first place together, we broke up, and to me it looked like my hope of owning a home was gone, too. Sure, I was making money, and more every year, but like many freelancers, my income was erratic. I never had any idea what I would be earning more than eight weeks out. To make things worse, I had credit card debt and had been late a few times on bill payments. Plus, I’d never heard of a freelancer buying her own place without also hearing that her spouse had a steady job, or that the freelancer’s career was bringing in six figures.
Neither of those descriptions fit me, and wouldn’t anytime soon.
So, while I was digging into pints of ice cream mourning a broken relationship, I was also mourning the broken dream of homeownership. As far as I could tell, I was either going to have to wait for a (corporate) knight in shining armor, or save my pennies for about 20 years. Yeah, good luck to me. Continue Reading
