This week I learned I know nothing about buying houses.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been waffling on the buy a house front for a few months now. I’ve even looked at a few. I thought I found the perfect, weird little fixer upper with a fireplace and a porch and a lawn that was just begging for some lawn gnomes about 10 minutes from where I graduated from college.

Well, I finally called a real estate agent, told her I want to buy a house, and she told me step one was to get preapproved for a mortgage.

She gave me the number of a guy to call and I thought, I’ve got this. I can literally put 50% down of the amount I want to spend and I have the assets to cover the rest. I was actually super cocky about the whole thing.

Turns out, I did not have this.

As a matter of fact, being a 1099 employee meant that particular lender didn’t think I had anything and wouldn’t even start a file on me.

He told me to come back when I had a W-2 job.

I know this is ridiculous, but it’s literally the first time my “eff the system, I do what I want” has come crashing down on me and I see why people are leery to leave their safe, predictable W-2 lives.

But, wait, I insisted. I have literally the amount of money I want to borrow from you in liquid or near liquid assets. I will actually have the amount of money I want to borrow from you as equity in the house after I put in my down payment.

Apparently, these things don’t matter.

So, I did what any responsible adult on the verge of buying a house would do. I curled up in my bed and took a sad nap.

Then I moped around the house for a few hours until my dad got home.

Then I flopped on the couch, sighed dramatically, and said, “I’m never gonna be able to buy a house.”

(You guys might never have guessed this, but with people I know really well, I can be quite dramatic. I had a beer with two of my really good friends from college the other night after a job interview there – where they both work – and had an existential breakdown about the direction of my life and if I take that job are all adventures over and how did I get so old but also I’m far too young to achieve what I always thought of as my settled down dream job…. they very patiently listened to my insane rant and then talked me off the ledge.)

Anyway, back to the house.

My dad looked at me like I’d grown a second head and said, “you know there’s more than one mortgage lender out there, right?”

And actually… in my fugue of self-pity all day, I hadn’t actually thought of that.

So, step one of buying a house is, very slowly, in motion. It is actually paused again at the moment while I see if I got the job at the college, because I would then be a W-2 employee again and that guy can just go suck a lemon. I’d take my business to a different mortgage lender anyway.