Welcome to HomeownerHeadaches.com, which is a website detailing the highs and lows of being a homeowner as our family experiences them.
Our Brief Homeowner Story
My journey towards personal and financial independence essentially started when I “left the nest”, so to speak, and moved out of my parents’ home to go to university in Los Angeles, California.
That started a period of about 10 years where I lived in an assortment of campus housing, apartments, and multi-unit homes.
During that time, after a long engagement, I married my longtime girlfriend, Julie.
Then, we had an opportunity to rent from my father’s single-family rental house in suburban Los Angeles, and we wound up living there for another 10 years.
During that time, our daughter was born, and we got a taste of what it’s like to be a homeowner (since we now had to deal with house issues as they came up) even though we didn’t technically own the property.
Finally, with the help of my parents, we leveraged the home that we had rented in order to purchase our own single-family residence nearby.
In the mean time, we rented out the single-family rental house.
And over the course of the next several years, we had to experience both the American Dream as well as the American Nightmare that is homeownership.
Everything you’re reading about on this website comes from our lived experiences that I’ve just described.
Heck, this website started because we were blindsided by home repairs that snowballed from a solar project!
And we continue to learn new things as they come up even to this day!
What Do We Know About Being A Homeowner?
As you can see from the brief story I gave above, we’re just ordinary people who happened to be owning a home.
I have to believe that if homeowner issues have been coming up for us, then surely other homeowners must be experiencing something similar.
That said, both Julie and I have some background that also work in our favor as far as coming up with this blog.
For starters, I am an engineer so my profession (as well as my personality) has instilled in me an appreciation for attention to detail, problem solving, documentation, and persistence.
In both my day job as well as in homeownership, I have seen for myself how not solving the root cause of problems comes back to bite us as much bigger problems down the road.
On the other hand, Julie used to be a product manager, which instilled in her a habit of following up to get things done.
Her experience has also helped her to assume the role of “foreman” when it comes to coordinating all the tasks that need to happen to support a project or job (except she now channels that energy to home repair).
Why We Want To Help People
We learned the hard way that you don’t know what you don’t know, and what you don’t know will hurt you.
Oscar Wilde said, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
Well, it turns out that homeowner mistakes can be some of the most expensive mistakes you can make in your life.
Indeed, we have the financial, emotional, and even physical scars to prove it!
I know the pain of being blindsided by unanticipated expenses that can wipe out any life savings or other long-term plans.
I consider myself to be financially conservative, and whether by dumb luck or by good habit (or both), I’ve been fortunate enough to get by so far.
However, I know how easy it is to fall prey into highly leveraged situations, where the power dynamic doesn’t work in your favor.
And the more this happens, the more stressed out people get, and the more stressed out people get, the more craziness we as a society experience – and that’s a bad thing!
I hate to say it, but we do live in a dog-eat-dog kind of world.
That said, hopefully by helping each other out, maybe in our own small way, we can turn the tide and try to live happier, more enriching lives (regardless of whether you own a home or not).
The Goal Of HomeownerHeadaches.com
I hope that by sharing our lessons learned as well as insights from our experiences that you may save yourself some of the costly headaches of being a homeowner.
I feel that homeownership does not need to be such a painful, dog-eat-dog kind of experience, and hopefully this website removes some of that bite in a small way.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us and we will do what we can to answer them and help you out.
All the best,
Johnny Cheng
Founder,
HomeownerHeadaches.com