This actually happened to us in 2005.  My family and I owned a home in California and owed 325,000.00.  We sold it for 498,000.00.  We moved to Texas that same year, and purchased a home that was almost three times the square footage for 150,000.00.  We paid cash.  

 It was great for the first year, but I found that I also lost motivation to do much of anything else.  I drifted from job to job, not caring much about how much I made as I knew I didn’t have a large mortgage hanging over my head any longer. 

By year two, I was bored and knew I needed to shake my life up again or I would not be happy.  So, we  put that house on the market, moved back to California, and found a house to rent.  This was at the beginning of 2007 when home prices were still on the high side of outrageous in Southern California.  It took another year to sell the house in Texas, so we had to maintain that home by keeping a gardener to take care of the year, and continued to pay utilities because you can’t show a house without electric and water service.    

Once we sold the house, at a 10,000.00 profit, we used that money to survive here in California, trying to wait out the housing crisis.  Alas, that did not work out very well, because by the time the housing market started taking a nose dive, so did the economy and job market.  So all of my home proceeds have gone to pay bills, and cover our overhead.  My husband is a casual longshoremen, and work for him has dried up.  My job doesn’t even come near to covering our expenses, including a 2200.00 home rental payment, two car payments, credit cards, utilities, and food.

We are back in debt and it will be a few years before we will see the light of day and dig our way out of this mess, but ultimately, I thrive on challenge and the more difficult it becomes the more determined I can be.

So there’s my story of what it was like to own a home without a mortgage payment.  Did I do it right?  Not by someone else’s standards, but I don’t live by their standards, I live by mine.