Several months ago, Brian and Belinda Sheets bought their first home. More recently, they bought the biggest Christmas tree they could find, and put it in the living room. They had to.
“It’s the only thing there,” Mrs. Sheets says. “We also have nothing in the dining room, study and one of the bedrooms.”
The minimalist look wasn’t an accident. When the couple paid $460,000 last summer for their five-bedroom Colonial in Stamford, Conn., they figured they could afford it “as long as I do without furniture,” says Mrs. Sheets, a 31-year-old former tax manager for Citicorp’s Citibank unit.
She expects several rooms to remain unfurnished until her 35-year-old husband, who recently completed a medical residency, becomes established.
This probably isn’t your parents’ idea of house poor. Years ago, young people bought modest starter houses, where they lived for a few years while saving up for the big family home.
These days, first-time buyers tend to be older and often skip the starter phase altogether. Last year, the average age of first-time U.S. home buyers was 32, up from 28 in 1976, according to a survey by Chicago Title & Trust Co. The average price of first-time homes soared to $152,900 last year, from $106,450 in 1987.
Because of the strong economy, many young professionals have more money these days for a down payment. Meanwhile, average home prices in many upscale neighborhoods have been rising even faster than last year’s 5 percent nationwide average. So in many cases, first-time buyers are splurging in the hope that a pricier property will have a better resale value over the long term.
In addition, “people are pushing themselves a little more now because interest rates are so low,” says Brookline, Mass., real estate broker Susan Liberman. “They want to lock in now.”
A generation ago, house poor probably meant a little bungalow with sparse furnishings. In the late ’90s, house poor can mean a mansion with empty rooms.
Michael Klein’s sprawling new 6,700-square-foot home on Chicago’s North Shore, for example, has no furniture in the dining room. The billiard room isn’t finished, and the living room has “just a couple of pieces.”
But Klein, the 36-year-old owner of Chicago-based Airoom Architects and Builders, says “I was willing to make some sacrifices to get into our area.”
The booming economy and the health of his business prompted him to “step up a little more than we would normally step up,” Klein says. He and his wife and two small children moved into the six-bedroom home last year.
The new house poor are also less willing to compromise on location, real estate experts say.
“Everybody wants to buy bigger and bigger and wants to buy over their head,” says Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research with the National Association of Home Builders.
Stuart Patterson and his wife, Jollee Faber, recently moved out of a rented, one-bedroom apartment and bought a four-bedroom Edwardian house in Portland, Ore.
The $338,000 they spent was more than they had originally planned, but the couple, both attorneys in their early 30s, wanted a place where they could raise children. In their new neighborhood, Faber says, “the houses are big and old and beautiful, and there are sidewalks.”
Inside their new house, however, there is less to rave about.
“We have no living room furniture, but we do have a $600 set of lawn chairs that my mother-in-law gave us and two $17 chairs Jollee bought before law school,” Patterson says.
Their dining room table was bought by his great-grandmother during the Depression. The couple sleep in the guest bedroom because they can’t stand the “tacky” large marble bathtub that stands in the master suite; they can’t yet afford to remove it.
Shortly after buying a 4,000-square-foot “contemporized farm house” in Westport, Conn., a handyman “put his finger through the side of the house, rotten wood, right outside the kitchen sliding door,” says Susan Kobylinski, 36, a New York caterer.
She recently moved into the house with her husband, an art director with an advertising agency, and their 15-month-old baby girl, from a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.
While various repairs are being paid for, decorating is on hold. So far, only the family room and the baby’s room are furnished. The bedroom has just a bed, and there is only a hydrangea box above the fireplace in the dining room.
People who have pushed their budgets as far as possible often underestimate the cost of keeping a roof overhead.
Susan Crawford says she has spent nearly $35,000 fixing holes in the ceiling and leaking pipes since she and her husband bought a house in Washington, D.C., in August. Like other house-poor professionals, she has found “you can spend an elaborate amount of money and not end up with more than what you thought you were getting–a functioning house.”
After saving for six years, the couple ended up spending about $100,000 more than they had planned. (She won’t disclose the purchase price.)
“We didn’t overpay,” she says, “but we are definitely in over our heads.” Meanwhile, Crawford, who recently was made a partner at a law firm, is learning to live with a room that has “wallpaper that looks like a leisure suit from the mid-’70s.”
Mrs. Sheets, the Stamford, Conn., home buyer, says stretching to buy a big house can be “nerve wracking.” But she hopes that in a few years, “we’ll be glad that we made the decision to skip the starter home.”
But for some, the cost of being house poor is too high.
Mary and Allan Shapiro extended themselves to the limit to build their dream house in a Minneapolis suburb, lived in it for six years and gave it up.
“We could have dealt with our three children complaining that we never went anywhere or did anything, but it became really tiring,” says Mrs. Shapiro, a freelance writer. “We had a gorgeous shell of a house, but the decoration never took place. It was a customized home with Salvation Army reject furniture.”
The Shapiros sold the place and bought a smaller house just a mile away, in a less fancy neighborhood with lower property taxes.
Less house has meant more perks. The family takes expensive vacations again and, this year, sent their older daughter to Europe on a summer program.
In the big house, Mrs. Shapiro says, “we were missing those kinds of things which weren’t necessities, but certainly give you a better quality of life.”
