Homeownership has been a monetary nightmare for this woman, and now she’s warning others.
Internet creator Samantha Barker was in good financial standing before she bought her first house, but purchasing property “has ruined me financially,” she shared in a viral video posted to her TikTok earlier this month.
In the clip, which has been watched more than 837,000 times, Barker explained how unexpected repair costs spent making her home livable broke her previously stable bank account.
“So before buying a house the only debt that I had was student loans and a car payment,” she says in the video. Since buying the house, in addition to paying her mortgage, she’s also had to spend $25,000 on new HVAC, $15,000 to get her foundation repaired “just so that I could use one of my bedrooms,” and she’s had to take out a $10,000 personal loan to fix her porch and deck “because my house was not insurable without it,” she adds.
“So, yeah, went from being the most financially sound, good to go, had my retirement saved up to drowning in debt,” she concludes, before adding that she’s now making money online to get herself back to a better financial place and is feeling “optimistic and empowered.”
Some viewers were less than empathetic to Barker’s plight. As a result, she turned off comments on the video to prevent those in a similar situation from reading them and feeling “like it’s their fault or they did something wrong” she explains in the caption, where she also emphasizes that “YET I GOT AN INSPECTION.”
Barker is far from alone in regretting buying a place of her own: A recent survey from buyer and seller-focused blog site Real Estate Witch found that a stunning 90% of millennial homeowners have regrets about their first home purchase.
The biggest regret, according to the findings, had to do with location, followed by “bad neighbors” and, in third place, having a high interest rate.