In this episode, David Sidoni sits down with first-time homebuyers Gage and Mozelle to share how their cross-country purchase went. Tune in and discover how they found a beautiful property in Ohio located near a dense oak forest. The couple shares what it is like to leave their rental property, their best strategies to live as cheaply as they can, and how they trusted their team to guide them towards a successful home purchase.
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Interview With Self Proclaimed “Not Privileged” First-Time Home Buyers
This is an epic interview. This interview covers a wide range of topics, including discovering how to buy a home when you don’t come from a place of privilege, choosing a new city, and buying a home from a whole different state, talking about buying with a partner and only having to use one of your income to qualify for a loan.
We talk about maximizing your good credit before and after the sale, planning to buy a home by using a whiteboard, and learning that the huge lesson and the best way to relieve yourself of all the stress that comes with buying your first home is getting with your real estate support team far sooner than you think that you should. This is an awesome interview. Let’s do this.
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This is exciting. We’re going to have an interview with Mozelle and Gage. I have talked to them for all of 32 seconds. I’m going to get to learn this as much as you have. We have communicated only by email and text over the months. We’ll talk about that. Tell everybody what city you guys bought in.
Cincinnati, Ohio.
Did you guys buy a townhome or a condo? What did you end up in?
We bought a 3 to 4-bedroom. We’re in the fourth bedroom, which is a basement, but we bought a four-bedroom house in the Forest Park area in Cincinnati.
I’m an old dude. Everybody drinks. You guys look young to me. Everybody wants to know how a young Cincinnati couple buys a four-bedroom house. What’s your biggest tip to everybody out there?
Closing Words
My biggest tip sounds simple, but it’s not. It’s do it. I don’t look up all the reasons you can’t do it. Don’t focus on all the negatives. Go for it. Start the process. The more you work on it, the more it’s going to start happening for you. It can be hard, but I don’t think that it’s as impossible as people say that it is these days. When you think about buying a house, people are like, “I can’t buy a house.” It’s possible. We’re in one.
Backstory
What’s cool about that is, number one, you are not selling the product of buying a house, and I get paid. You’re telling a story. Number two, you weren’t like, “Do it. It’s easy.” You were like, “Do it. It’s not impossible.” It’s not like clicking and buying a cell phone, but there’s honesty behind what you’re saying. That gets me excited for people to read. Tell us your story. How long were you guys renting before you thought about this? Why did you think about it? What was your reason to start thinking about it?
We were renting. That year is when we started to be serious about it. It wasn’t like an idea or a pipe dream.
Was it one of those things that you guys were renting individually? Have you guys always been living together when you’ve been renting? How’d that work for you?
We lived in an apartment together for several years before. That’s how long we’ve been together. Before, I was renting an apartment somewhere else. We were in apartments all before this. We got together. That’s when we started. The idea came up. It’s always something like, “We can get a house.” It’s a joking thing. We’re like, “I don’t know. Let’s see.” That’s how it started.
I always ask about partnerships because a lot of times, you get an apartment together, and the other one’s thinking, “How long is this going to last?” You guys have been doing it for a while. It becomes that step. What took you from joking to exploring? Did you go to the Millennials and Gen Z best friends and go to Google?
Getting sober helped. We got sober about the year mark, and that was huge for us.
You went, “We got to get a house now.” Is that what happened?
Frugal Strategies
There are other factors outside of buying a house that we wanted sobriety. It helped, is what I’m saying. I started researching. I do this thing where I try to live as frugally as possible. My granddad was into that. He instilled that in me. I started researching. I was like, “How can this be possible?” I know it is. I feel like people used to always tell me, “Credit cards are not a good idea. Buying a car is hard.” I did both of those. I was like, “That was easy.”
I was thinking in my head, “I feel like I should stop listening to what everybody’s saying about the real estate market and try it and see if it’s possible.” From there, I started researching. What I did was I made a list of what I could find as the affordable cities in which you can buy a house. We looked at the list together, and I was like, “Where do you think you’d like to live?” We narrowed it down to Cincinnati, Nashville, Tennessee, and a few others.
Stop listening to what’s everybody is saying about the real estate market and just give it a try.
Are you guys from that area, or did you relocate there?
We relocated here.
We were renting in Arizona. We moved across the country.
2024 has been full of insanity of change, but it’s been the best year.
We’re going to dive into that. I’m excited and stoked for you guys with the move, sobriety, and new lease on life. Believe it or not, I hit mine at 51. I was like, “That’s enough of that.” The show and wanting to be able to help people was a huge thing for me. I’ll tell you what is interesting about what you said, Gage. Frugal people have a chance to move forward.
The biggest psychological mind piece, which has math behind it, that I try to instill in people is you can be a frugal person and do well in life by depriving and buying cheaper options and used options. That can help you figure out what the best credit card is and the best rate, not use it out of control, and not let the interest control you. That can do the same thing with a car.
The thing about a home and people who are frugal is they sit there and try to be frugal for several years, but they don’t realize they’re paying the rent. It’s not about, “Let me find the cheapest house possible.” If you’re renting, let me do this as quickly as possible so that money goes towards us as opposed to nothing.
If you’re building your credit for so long, what is the goal of that? The goal of that is to make a big purchase, maybe a house. I feel like that might be the cap of that goal for a lot of people. It can relinquish some of that stress. You could use your credit cards more when you get a house. You have the thing that credit is the goal for. We weren’t house-poor when we got here. I could buy a few things with this credit card now because we have the thing. This is what credit is for.
I help people. We are starting this thing called the last lease ever. We’ll get their credit score up to a certain point. If they’ve already had their car and they get approved for the apartment, I’m like, “Go out to dinner next week. You don’t need to stay at 75% utilization. You don’t need to have your credit card at only 29% because they’re trying to stay right below 30%.”
I was thinking about that the other day, and it clicked. I was credit-minded to make sure that I could do this stuff. I’m sitting in my own house that I bought, and I’m like, “I don’t want to hit my credit. What am I guarding my credit for? What do I need to get? Am I buying a boat? Let’s get it.” I’m not saying max out your credit cards once you buy a house. Once that happens, you’ve succeeded. You can splurge a little bit.
There are all these new young financial gurus out there that are talking to people about being rich. It’s about work-life balance. You are living a rich life where rich doesn’t mean money. I get that. What I find is the people who are the most freaked out about credit scores are the frugal people. I’m screaming to them, “800 credit score is fine. You’re okay.” The top credit score is 760 to buy a home. If you’re 760, 768, 790, or 802, you get the same interest rate.
I can tell you if you’re reading this that our home is under my income only, not hers, because I have a remote job, and she doesn’t. When we’re buying out of state, that can cause some complications. There are ways around that. We talked to our realtor. I don’t know if you know, but Ed is a combo for people who are looking in Cincinnati. His wife is a mortgage loan officer.
I’ve got two of those. I tell people all the time, “My wife says that I’m married to my video producer.” It used to be I was married to my lender. A lot of times, people are like, “I don’t want to do that. It’s all for the same team.” You have two people rooting for you together.
It makes it easy because they can work together. They already know each other. It’s not like this thing where they have to establish a relationship. They already have one.
Exploring The Options
I have seen it work multiple times. My standards are high to be a unicorn. If you’re a unicorn, that’s great. If I happened to be in bed with my lender at night, I’m sure that we’d be like, “Is DTI going to cover it?” Let’s talk about this. Dig into the process because people reading are wondering, “We’re a couple. One of us has a job that can work someplace else. How did you discover that?” If you’re like Mozelle and don’t have an established career at the new place, your income may not count. If you land a new contract, you only need one paycheck to have your income count. It sounds like you guys went through the motions and figured out that Gage was enough. Tell us about that.
That was like our first hangup. That was our first like, “This could be a problem.”
It stressed me out quite a bit. I remember being like, “Am I going to move there for several months and rent?”
You were thinking you were going to move there and get a job.
I will work for a little bit to build that up.
It was the first issue that made us be like, “Are we going to be able to do this?”
You didn’t stop. You explored the issue with somebody else. Instead of believing everybody else is telling you it’s impossible, ask.
Amanda, who is the combo for Ed, was like, “You guys need to stop working.” I kept bringing it up. It was stressing us out. I was trying not to make it show, but it was obvious. We were like, oh my God, “How are we going to do this with one?” She was like, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’re going to run my income like we’re going to do yours, and we’re going to see. I can always change it. It’s not a big deal.” She ran mine. We were at what our target was for buying. It was never an issue. We had stressed about it for so long. We had done all this research on YouTube. We were freaking ourselves out. Amanda was like, “Let’s run your credit.” It was fine.
We didn’t think it was a possibility to run one person’s credit for some reason.
I say on the show all the time, “It’s not your fault.” That’s why I work and have been doing this for so long. I try to explain to people that most of the information out there is fear-based and horror stories sell.
Those are the ones to remember.
People have to remember that a lot of the content that they’re consuming is content because horror stories sell. It’s content because a scary story is good content. Those are going to get millions of views. They’re going to make more of those because they’re trying to make money making content. They might not be trying to help you as much as you think.
Purchase Price And Neighborhood Vetting
I always tell people about the education channels. People are like, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” I’m like, “Why are you asking how to fix a refrigerator? It’s boring. That dude might know everything.” That’s great advice for everybody. Explore the options. One of the things that I’m trying to do with the show now in this last lease is to get the unicorns set up. We’ve got great teams like Ed and Amanda. Ask, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll be like, “You need to work on this for a year.” In your case, you got right to it. You said you got right to the point you were looking for based on one. Were you looking at the purchase price or monthly payment to find out, “That’s our sweet spot?”
All About The Property
We were looking at both, but it was mainly the purchase price. Another thing that solidified is not dreaming of getting a home, but we’re getting a home. After we discussed and landed in Cincinnati, we came to Cincinnati for a week. We got a cheap Airbnb. We stayed at the Airbnb. I brought my laptop. We went through Zillow, drove around, and started looking at houses in different price ranges. We narrowed down our price range. We’re like, “These houses in this price range look good and are in nice neighborhoods.”
That was cool to do because I had this thought in the back of my head that, like, “We’re going to get down there and look at houses we can afford. They’re all going to be ghetto and trash.” They weren’t. That’s when it became like, “We can do this. These are houses that we could live in. We live in a forest. It’s beautiful. It’s insane.
What were the key factors for you when you were driving around? What was interesting was that you did something that I tried to explain to people a lot of the time. You have to look beyond the pictures. You guys are looking at neighborhoods.
We weren’t sure at first, but we built it as we drove around. As we saw a couple of houses, we were like, “We like this.” We were looking for nice neighborhoods, beautiful yards, and houses that looked like they weren’t project houses because we’re not construction people. We don’t know how to fix a house. We wanted something that we could get in and live in right away. We were making that list as we went. It gets easier if you drive around because you see them in person. We weren’t trying to be creepy, but if it looked vacant, we would even park on the road, walk around the house and look at it.
I’ve been chased out of neighborhoods. I’m with my phone out the window as I’m videoing. I was like, “See the graffiti and that junkyard front yard right there.” The third neighbor was like, “What?” I was like, “Sorry.” My people were away in Mexico celebrating the 4th of July, which is ironic. There are Americans in Mexico. I had to show them this one is ghetto. The street view sometimes will help you out with that.
Some people are good at doctoring their photos. If there’s a lot of contrast and saturation in that photo, and if that green grass looks unbelievably green and that blue sky looks insanely blue, look at the house.
Working With David
How did this work for you? Did you guys reach out to me before or after you went to Cinci?
After.
Did you talk to your unicorn team about taking a trip there? Did you guys do it on your own?
Before we talked to you, we went to Cincinnati. We found you after we visited Cincinnati.
The first time we went to Cincinnati, we didn’t know much about it. It was mainly to see how it felt to be there. When we got back, that’s when it got more serious. I was working a job where I was alone all the time. Podcasts were huge for me. I was like, “Why don’t I use this time to learn something?” That’s when I found you. I listened to one other one that wasn’t doing it for me but yours.
I remember going through the titles. The titles of the episodes are what related to me most. There are real situations, and I was like, “This one is what we’re going through. This one was good.” That’s when I was telling him, “There’s so much we have to do.” We started seriously looking. I reached out to you quickly, and you were fast. It was an hour. I was like, “Where’s the time that we pay something?”
I remember that she was sitting on the bed behind me. We lived in an apartment. I work from home. I had my work computer set up. She’s got a bed behind me. She’s always hanging out on it. She’s like, “That David Sidoni guy emailed me already.” I was like, “No way.” We thought it was fake at first. We were like, “Is that real?” It was like, “This looks real.”
About three times a day, I have to explain to people I’m not a robot.
That’s what it said in the email. There were times it was hard, but for the most part, it was natural how things started happening for us. It was not what I expected it to be in a good way.
It got overwhelming. We found your show. You hooked us up with a team. From there, it started moving forward. Once you find a team, you can let them lead and start going. They’re going to ask you for stuff, and you give it to them.
Another tip I would say is that I remember listening to an episode where you were talking about finding a realtor soon. At the time, there’s to build that relationship. I remember listening to that. We had a whiteboard of when we should start looking for a realtor. I looked at that whiteboard. I was like, “This is way too late. We have to look for one now.”
In my mind, I was thinking that we wouldn’t need a realtor or a mortgage loan officer until we’re way closer to purchasing time. That was not the right way to be thinking there. You need a team as early as possible.
We were able to start talking to Ed. That’s when things started happening for us. Our plan started to make more sense. It’s how it happened.
This is gigantic for me because you did it. You’re successful. You had a pleasant experience. Mozelle, you’re whiteboard is awesome. I want to take that and move it over for everybody. Why don’t people do that?
I’m an advocate for whiteboards. Everybody these days is like, “I have a list on my phone.” They have a document on their desktop. I’m like, “You’re not going to ever open that document. You need to have it in your face.” We took command strips. We put the whiteboard by our door in the bedroom in the apartment. Every time we walk by it, it’s in your face. You can’t miss it.
What I like about a whiteboard is that it’s better than Post-It reminders. When it becomes automatic, you can write the same thing in a different font or color, and it becomes a new reminder every day. What’s neat about this is it worked out for you. I appreciate what you guys were thinking. I’m glad the show was helpful to you.
As you understand, I am a matchmaker. Years ago, I said, “If you wanted to go through every single title and learn every single thing, you could have, and you would’ve found Ed and Amanda.” They would’ve been like, “No, we do that.” You would’ve been like, “I don’t have to know everything about a home inspection.” What I haven’t done a good enough job of is you haven’t found the show yet. If you had found the show, that Airbnb trip would’ve been with Ed. You would’ve been able not to be creepy.
The second trip we took here with Ed was a completely different experience.
It’s funny you say that because we did after finding the show. We did have one with him. With that one, we were rushed, and it was insane. Ed was like, “We’re going to get eight houses a day.”
Did you get that thing at the end of the day where he’s talking about the first house, and you’re like, “All the living rooms look the same?”
I’m like, “What was the first house? I don’t know where I am right now.”
That’s where it gets the most intense. We were on a time crunch there because the apartment lease was ending. We felt like we had to choose something.
The cool thing about this is moving the working the realtor up on the whiteboard could have eliminated some of the pressure and the stress. The great thing is, with the team, it was stressful, but it still got done, and it’s understanding that there are few. It’s 300 out of 1.5 million realtors out there. It’s 0.03%.
Stressful Trip
There are people who are going to work with you early. You learned about the options of a solo buy versus a dual buy as far as the approval. The goal for me and the show is to get people to learn as much as they can. I’m flattered that people are reading this, but I’m like, “Would you go talk to somebody in the area?” Talk to us about that because there are a lot of people moving from other places. Talk to us about that stressful trip. Was it like, “We’re going there to see houses?”
On that second trip, it was getting close to the time. We knew that we were planning on this. It was on our whiteboard. We were like, “It’s time to go down there.” You can start putting offers in a few months before. We added time down to when we wanted it. This was the crunch time when we were like, “We want to buy soon.” We’re looking at these houses now, and if we like them, we can put an offer on them type of trip.
We didn’t want our lease to end, and we had to stay somewhere waiting. It was scary.
We did time it perfectly.
Thanks to Ed and Amanda. They are unicorns. It’s insane. We came down here. We were like, “Ed, we want to look as many houses as we can. We don’t have that much time because Ohio is far away from Arizona. We need to cram what we can into this weekend.” It was like a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, maybe Monday. It was an extended weekend. He did. He was busy on Friday. He couldn’t do Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, it was 8 or 9 houses a day. He was there and pumping them out and exuberant. He bought us lunch. He’s awesome and hilarious. We were tired and sore. After the first day, we were like, “We have to do this tomorrow.”
We did put an offer in a house, but it didn’t go through. It ended up being a good thing because it was in an area we weren’t 100% in love with. The second house was it.
Do you think that you offered harder and more aggressively on this one because you are in love with the home? Did it feel like there was a lot of competition on this one? How’d this one work out?
There was a lot of competition on the first one. It was like the luck of the draw. Somebody else got it. This one didn’t have as much competition. It was fresher on the market. It had a delay. There was something weird with that house.
I was pending, and something didn’t go through. It was back on, and Ed was like, “Let’s put an offer in.”
He was like, “This is a situation where we can get in there. Make an offer and grab this.”
It was a tactic he had. I was like, “Do what you have to do.”
It’s funny because you guys are like, “This happened, and it worked out.” I’m telling you, 9 out of 10, other realtors don’t work that way and don’t understand. In this market, I use every trick I’ve got. I have auto-alerts on my phone and computer. If we put an offer on something or look at something that’s already under contract, three times a day, I’m checking.
When it falls out, the seller is bummed, and the listing agent is lazy. If I call them back and go, “You look like crap to your seller right now, don’t you?” I don’t say that, but I say, “How would you like to look fantastic to your seller? In less than four hours, have another offer ready to go who loves this house from a team that is respected and that you know we’re going to close the home.” That type of understanding is a leg up.”
We were like, “What happened there?” I don’t feel like you have to become an expert at home buying to buy a home. You have to go. If you have a good team, what they should be doing as professionals is they should know these things. You don’t have to fill in all those gaps for them. You don’t have to completely understand those things like an expert. A lot of people think that they have to do that before they even start. You know what I mean? People overresearch sometimes.
You don’t have to feel like an expert when buying a home. You just need a good team of professionals who knows what they are doing.
The trust factor in the industry, or the lack of trust, has been well-earned. That’s why I started the show. That’s why the third act of my life is helping people get through the BS. That is the real estate industry. Once you know you have a good person on your side, you can stop. I had an interview with a doctor who said, “I’m WebMDing my realtor. I hate when patients do this.”
I’m like, “Spend more time at the beginning researching and trusting your team. If, in the approval process or the looking around process, you don’t feel trust at that point, spend more time on that part of the game. Spend more time in the interviewing, educating, and listening. Once you’re in, go for it.” When I’m on the table with a heart surgeon, even if I wasn’t under anesthesia, I’m not going to be like, “Little more to the left.”
He made it feel like natural and easy. They both made it feel like it was not chaotic because it wasn’t all on you.
It’s a difficult thing to do at this point because things are moving quickly. In reality, you guys were a horror story waiting to happen with 80% of the realtors out there. We’re moving from state to state. We’re dropping one income. We need to research and figure it out. You could have had anybody sending you stuff randomly. You might have gotten into the house. Several months later, you have been like, “We could have done X, Y, and Z. We could have been over there in that cool house that backs up to the forest.” You’re in that house. Tell us about it. What’s the neighborhood like? What’s the house like?
It is like a fairytale. We had no idea that Forest Park existed. We live in a place called Forest Park. It is aptly named. If you zoom into Cincinnati on Google Maps, there’s this green portion up north. That’s Forest Park. It’s this green belt area that has a lake. It’s this big forest that has been preserved, like a national park, but it’s a great park program out here. They’ve preserved that area, but there are neighborhoods all around, making a circle around that like a forest.
We’re in the middle of a dense, beautiful oak forest. It’s called Forest Park. It’s amazing. There are huge trees everywhere. It’s quiet and safe. We are millennials. It’s not weird. We don’t feel like the neighbors are watching us. Everybody’s doing their own thing. It’s laid back. It’s perfect. We’re half a mile away from a huge lake and a big park area with all these trails.
We discovered this as we went. We’re like, “Look at where we are.” For this price in Arizona, at least in our area, it was not this.
Arizona is one of the fastest-growing, if not the fastest-growing, real estate markets of all time. It used to be not long ago. Several years ago, you could get a nice house in Mesa for around $300,000. Now, it’s $480,000 for something sketchy-looking. Arizona got insane, and we started looking cheaper.
People are like, “Can I buy a house?” I’m like, “Sure, but let’s talk about where and why.” You can buy any house. Anybody could buy a house if they got a job, but it’s figuring out where, why, and what the most important pieces are for you. Your story of frugality and trusting the team, as well as even a little lesson that could have been learned through your success story, is that you can always reach out earlier. The right people are going to be there to help you. We could have erased that off the whiteboard.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. People are afraid of that.
If you don’t understand that answer, ask again in a different way.
Home Purchase Advice
I set it up. I say I’m going to do a lot of things in our relationship where you feel like I might be talking to a kindergartner. That is 100% on purpose. I’ve made a mistake in the past 3 or 4 interviews where I’ve said, “Thank you very much.” I turn it off. I stick around and talk to the people. One of them told me, “The reason I wanted to buy a house is because my mom is in Ukraine. She’s in trouble and needs a place to live.” I’m like, “This wasn’t recorded.” Is there anything, before I let you go, about the process that you would like to share with the public?
Start asking questions early. The biggest thing was I held on tightly to beliefs that were not true. It was letting those go, opening up to new information, learning for yourself, and not paying attention to what other people are saying to you about the process because each process is different and unique. Stay true to what yours is.
No matter what you’re doing in life, buying a house supply, trying to fix your credit, or buying a car, you can research as much as you can, but every single situation is unique. You have to start doing it to figure out how it is for you, no matter what it is. Once you start doing it, the worst thing that can happen is somebody says no.
It’s hard for me to explain to people because I’m old now. In my 20s and 30s, I didn’t. By the time I figured out and did this whole housing stuff, everyone was like, “It was easy for you.” I’m like, “No. By the time I did it, the Millennials were of age doing it. I did it through the same crap that you did.” There are a lot of people out there who are upset that warehousing prices are gone and things are unaffordable. Understanding that it might not be as good as your grandpa but nobody’s is. There is a path. You guys found the path.
I will say one more thing. We’ve had rough lives. We’re not privileged in any way. This isn’t for a specific type of privilege. If you put the work into this, you can do this no matter who you are. I want to throw that out there. We have had tough lives, and we made it happen. This wasn’t handed to us. Anybody can do this.
If you put the work into it, home buying is always possible no matter who you are.
That’s a huge lesson. I fight that battle a lot, mostly on social media. I found that with the show. If people come to me from the show, they’re not quite as angry and cynical. They have a right to be. All these movements started way back when with the 99%, 1% movement. I hear you. What I’m trying to do is help people like you who say, “I’m not privileged, but is there a hack? Can I get in here?” I’m like, “Yeah.”
The houses that those people are talking about are the million-dollar homes. That’s not what we bought. We bought a nice home, but it’s a home for people who put the work into it.
It’s crazy where I am that first-time buyers are looking at $700,000 to $800,000. There are people all over the country who are whining and saying, “I can’t buy a house for $17,000.” I’m like, “You’re paying $2,000 a month in rent. You’re bitching about it, but you’re still doing it. Let’s look at what $2,000 could buy you with a mortgage.”
It’s such a waste. Towards the end, I was like, “I cannot pay one more month for this place. Can we please go?”
Doesn’t that suck because you’re like, “Slow down, I have to keep doing it?” You’re sending that rent check. “You’re like, “I don’t want to press enter. This makes me mad.”
It’ll be in the past. It’s okay. I know rent works for people, but it wasn’t for us.
You get over it. It’s like that last hour of work if you’re clocked into a job. It’s the same energy. You’re like, “Is this over yet?”
It’s great. It keeps people not tied down. It’s awesome in your twenties. The average age is 36. If I could take every one of those 36-year-old first-time home buyers, the average age, and talk to them when they were 30, I bet 80% to 90% of them would’ve bought a home at 30, 31, and 32. I would’ve been like, “Here is all the money you’re going to save from your rent increases. You can travel and do all the stuff you want to do.”
That’s good to know we’re under that mark. We’re 31 and 32.
You guys scored. What happened was if it were not for the show, you would’ve gone to Cincinnati, come home, and be like, “We found a narrate. What the hell do we do?”
It would’ve been way more overwhelming and stressful. It went perfectly. We could not have asked for a better experience. Even with the harder areas, it was amazing.
I’m stoked for you guys. Everybody else out there, go back and read this. We hit many wonderful topics right here, from how to buy with a partner, how to apply with one income, and how to figure out how to move cross country. Thank you guys so much. Congratulations on the home. Congratulations on this wonderful new chapter that you’ve built for yourself. You told me how old you are. This sucks. I was going to say, “I feel like your uncle, but could I be a father?” No, that would be weird. I will say that, as one of your older friends, I’m proud of you guys. Congratulations. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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That was an awesome one. Gage said it. They were not privileged. He said they had tough lives growing up, and yet here they are. They made it happen. He said, “Anybody can do this. You have to put in the work.” They discovered that the work, planning, preparation, and research ended up being more stressful for them than it should have been.
The whiteboard is an awesome idea. It helped keep them organized and on task. It also became that thing they walked by every day and was a little bit of a trigger and a stress creator. They said they felt like it was overwhelming, but once they found it got matched with their unicorn team, suddenly, it got a whole crap tone easier for them.
Gage said that people over-research and get analysis paralysis. Their biggest takeaway is, “You don’t have to become an expert on buying a home to go and buy a home.” Once they found their team, they discovered that Mozelle didn’t have to move there to establish a new job to get put on the loan. They could find ways to do this on one income. It’s a huge stress reliever. Thanks to the expertise of that unicorn support team.
They also discovered that once they moved in, they didn’t have to feel house-poor because they had a huge safety net with a great credit that they built up. They worked hard to build up their credit, and they realized that they could use those credit cards afterward. They could enjoy their big purchase. No need to worry about those credit scores anymore. He said, “You can use the credit card after the close because what am I guarding my credit for? Am I going to buy a boat?”
They also discovered that having a good working relationship with a unicorn lender means that you have combined synchronicities. That’s not a word. It means they have a full team working in sync. You don’t have to be burdened and stressed that everyone is working together so that you get the best outcome. You know that a unified front is working for you.
The moral of their story is that now that they’ve been through this entire process, they’re sitting there saying they got their fairytale ending. They did say, “It was literally a fairytale.” Emotionally, it is the correct use of the word literally. They killed it with their whiteboards and their preparations. Eventually, they found the show so they could feel more at ease because they were getting an education. Mozelle, it’s all free. You don’t have to pay me anything. That was me, not a robot, who did reach out to help you kickstart your planning.
The great thing about their story is that once they were in the process of buying a home, they discovered that as a first-time home buyer, they didn’t need to become experts in the process of buying a home. They figured out that you should become an expert in researching your team. They can use their expertise to show you the path. Spend more time researching who is going to be your team than what that team will be doing. As they said, “Don’t believe all the scary content you see online.” That content is out there. It’s trying to go viral. It’s not trying to help you with all those horror stories that you hear. They’re trying to get views. It’s not offering education and solutions.
I am freaking ecstatic for Gage and Mozelle. This is why I quit my broker in 2019 to start this revolution. What about you? Are you looking for that fairytale ending? Go to HowToBuyAHome.com and start early. That was their recommendation, not mine. There are three different ways on there. You can take the starter course if you want to get going. You can ask David and shoot me your question, or find that team early. Get your unicorn team and start your planning if you are a month, a year, or two years away. The revolution is in full swing. Every person out there, no matter where you are on the ladder of privilege, can still make this dream of home ownership a reality. You can do this.