I’m a homeowner now.
That’s so weird to say!
Next week, I’ll be a lead forecaster (temporarily) at NWS Fairbanks, Alaska.
That’s so weird to say!
Life can sometimes throw curveballs at you.
I never imagined that Elizabeth and I would be buying a house in 2024. Heck, I can remember sitting in our bedroom in Rehoboth Beach in 2022, looking at my bank account and realizing I had $7 left to last me until my last grad paycheck arrived. I can remember the horrible feeling of despair when my car got wrecked a few months later, and having no clue how I would afford payments on a new one. I can remember the feeling of glee when I realized that the gas mileage on my trip to the NWS Foundations Course in Kansas City in 2023 would be enough to pay off my credit card. I wasn’t quite going into debt during my first half year working for the NWS, but it was by increasingly thin margins.
Then something funny started to happen late last year. I started making money. And fast. It’s weird to say this in a world that seems like it’s increasingly dominated by stories of men my age ruining their finances through sports betting, but the big change in my life was that I learned how to make a bunch of money betting on sports – or more accurately, playing Daily Fantasy Pick ‘Em. At first, in spring 2023, I was playing with small sums – I only put $200 of my own money into PrizePicks. Then there was a big “Flex Friday” win for $833.33 (I’ll never forget you for shutting down the Braves, Chris Bassitt. Without you, this house may not have been possible). Even then, it was all dribs and drabs last summer until I had a come-to-Jesus moment with myself. Why be cautious and keep withdrawing from my $2,000 bankroll when I could scale this thing up and dare to dream big?
And so last fall I went on an epic journey. Fueled by an incredible college football season and an incredibly profitable betting strategy, I went from $4,000 to $20,000 in my bankroll by the New Year. And the momentum hasn’t stopped yet – according to my spreadsheet, my 2024 betting profit through the end of July was $61,000. Paying off the remaining $14,000 on my car took just 3 months into the new year. Suddenly, I could take Elizabeth to Sedona for Christmas, or buy her a Louis Vuitton bag (which she hasn’t taken out of the box yet after a month – big fail).
So sure, why not look at a house?
I don’t want to claim the credit for us being able to afford a down payment. 75% of our down payment came from Elizabeth, who had smartly invested her inheritances and was ready when the moment came. Thank you so much to her for believing us enough to think this was the right time. Without her, and without that betting money to make mortgages easier down the road, we probably wouldn’t be buying for another 2 or 3 years.
Even as it was, buying was an interesting process. 2024 seems like it will be the peak of two really malignant factors – interest rates hovering near 7% and housing prices rising, rising, rising. In a lot of ways, summer 2024 was a stupid time to buy. And yet, on the other hand, the sheer badness of the environment was our greatest asset. As Elizabeth planned to transition out of her career at Oklahoma Emergency Management, we kept our options open about where to move. As she moved nearer and nearer to a job with the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis, we started touring with two builders in Norman to find our first piece of land we’d own. My camera roll is littered with pictures of random appliances at new homes.
Several of my coworkers have bought houses in 2023 and 2024, when supply was limited and prices were rising, rising, rising. They told horror stories of all-cash offers, homes on the market for less than a day, people offering 5 figures above asking, etc. One of the two builders we talked to tried those tactics – pressuring, saying they didn’t know when stuff would go off the market, messaging us. The other builder basically said that their house had been ready to move into for months, and we could take our time making a decision. It was a great business move for them.
Thus, we entered a month of negotiations over improvements to the house – they were asking $342,000 for it and definitely weren’t going to get that much from anyone as it was. We managed to get quite a few concessions out of them to stay at asking price, including an inground tornado shelter and a 10-year structural warranty. I got a loan approved for us and began packing stuff up at our old rental. On June 28, 2024, I met Elizabeth and her mother at the title agency. We signed some documents, and boom! I was a homeowner.
Sometime in the last 4 years of living together, Elizabeth and I have begun to accumulate way too much stuff. Our move into this house took so much longer and required so much more packing than our move into The Links back in 2020. The process of packing, bringing stuff over, and cleaning our old house at 305 Woodside Drive took me almost the entire month of July (excepting the week we were in Rehoboth Beach). But on July 30, I grabbed the final few items and said my last good-bye to our rental house. It was honestly a fantastic house to live in.
But it’s pretty cool having a house of our own!
We’ve got a tidy little back yard.
The interior is still an absolute mess a month and a half later, but that’s understandable given we’ve really only had everything here for a week and a half. Basically every day that I’m home, there’s a new project to work on. One day it was unpacking 2 boxes of kitchen stuff that remained. Another day it was hanging up shelves in our living room to put picture frames on (do NOT ask me about the anchor bolts). Yesterday it was this behemoth of a task with Aaron to get some storage into our garage, that took an entire afternoon (but was well worth it):
I don’t think Elizabeth and I will be fully “moved in” until late this fall. Certainly we won’t be throwing any house-warming parties until September or October at the earliest. That’s fine. Being a homeowner is teaching the art of patience and the value of hard work ALONG with being a great object lesson in budgeting.
What’s important is that we have a house, and we’re going to make it a home.
Now: The Alaska thing. I have the once-in-a-lifetime, way-too-exciting opportunity to spend four weeks in Fairbanks as a forecaster at the WFO there. Getting to this point has been surreal, and I cannot wait to see what the month has in store for me.
It all started at the beginning of the year when I saw former NWS Norman employee and friend of mine Randy Bowers tweet about his time spent as a TDY (temporary duty station) SOO (science and operations officer) in Fairbanks.
We chatted about it for a while in DMs, and he promised to pass my name along to leadership at the office. And then I forgot all about it for several months, when Randy DM’d me again to mention that there was an opportunity for a forecaster to go up there for 4 weeks in the summer. The first window was during Elizabeth and my anniversary as well as beach week; there was no way she’d be okay with that. But after a little wheedling and an expensive date at Tarahumara’s, I was able to get her on board. Mark and Todd were surprisingly very willing to let me go for a month. I still wasn’t sure if I was going or if I needed to interview or anything, until one day the MIC at the office e-mailed Mark to make sure I could do the job. He sent back a glowing review, and she was sold. I was heading to Alaska.
My trip is from August 11 to September 6. If I get this out today, you’ll note that it’s August 11. I’m currently typing this sentence from the OKC Airport, and I’m sure I’ll be finishing up in my layover in Seattle. I’ll be documenting my thoughts in an Alaska diary on this blog as many days as I can manage to publish. It’s a work trip first and foremost, so most of my days will be occupied with the unique challenge of being a forecaster in Fairbanks, Alaska, where your forecast area is roughly the size of the Midwest. It’s going to be a tougher couple of weeks of forecasting than I’m used to, but there’s no growth in continuing to do what you’ve always done. On top of that, because it’s a TDY position, the government is going to pick up the expenses for me. That includes my flights, the hotel for a month, my rental car, and a per diem for food. All of that goes *on top* of my normal salary. If you put it all together, you start to see why I couldn’t pass this up.
And then there’s the opportunities to explore. They might be a little bit sparse, given how many days I’ll be working out of the next month, but I still have this coming Saturday off, a work trip to Denali (how crazy is that!) next Friday, and then my parents, Alex, and Elizabeth coming in for the long Labor Day weekend.
I don’t know how it’s all going to work out, but I know that the path toward new opportunities lies forward, and I look forward to updating this blog with the beginning of my adventures.
