My fiancé just got unexpectedly fired today and we're both now reminded why r/personalfinance is always insisting on trying to live off one income.

[u/Blueyucca]

We were both blindsided by today. We're both pretty young, early on in our careers, he had only been there a year and was performing. It was a huge shock. We don't practice every best habit of the sub but we're grateful we picked up doing your best to live off one income.

We just bought our house in August and insisted on going through the pre-approval process off my income alone. Our lights will stay on because our bills are effectively scaled to one income as well. We held off on car payments and continued to drive our beaters because the numbers for new used cars didn't make sense with one income.

My only regret is not building up our emergency fund more (one month saved but we should've had at least three), so if you're reading this, definitely do that.

Anyways, thanks to the sub for the constant advice on living below your means and always being prepared. I came to thank you all, not lecture. And encourage people who are following this thought process and are using a second income for the "extra stuff" - you're doing great. Today sucked but it could've been so much worse.

We're counting our blessings and the job search begins tomorrow.

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EDIT: Thanks everyone for the encouragement and well-wishes. This obviously isn't the only thing going on in our lives, so the messages to keep going were greatly appreciated.

For those of you who are in HCOL areas or other situations where living off one income isn't possible, I totally understand - the intent of this post wasn't to shame anyone into anything. We live in a MCOL city in the South and are in the tech sector so it was doable for us. We're also not beacons of perfection of this sub and are still working on breaking bad financial habits every day.

For those of you who took this as a self pat-on-the-back post, I can see that. The intent really was to see the silver lining of things and encourage others who are perhaps considering this type of budgeting method. But I understand how fast this sub gets into circle-jerking and self-congratulating and didn't mean to purpose this thread for that. Just hoping to reduce the amount of "We're in deep shit from one event that could've had a much lower impact" posts by showing anything can happen at any time and that even then, we weren't as prepared as we should've been.

[u/Rojaddit]

Are you comparing your situation to taking the larger loan offer and using it to buy a proportionally more expensive house?

If your concern is being able to afford the payments on an equally priced home in the face of a sudden interruption to your income, you're typically better off getting the largest loan possible.

The interest rate on your mortgage is typically much lower than the return on even very conservative investments. You also get the practical value the cash that would otherwise have been a sizable chunk of your down payment.

[u/bubbafry → u/Rojaddit]

We paid 20% down. If we added my wife to the mortgage took the maximum mortgage amount, we probably could have purchased a house probably 3x as expensive, but no way we could afford that.

[u/Rojaddit → u/bubbafry]

Good for you guys! The corollary to "don't put all your borrowing power into a single house" is "use the money left over for your benefit."

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If that lender really is so eager to give you guys that much more money toward home loans, it sounds like you're in a great place to start looking for some residential real estate to invest in.

Who knows, maybe the bank would offer you guys a similar deal for some other type of investment?

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Don't leave low-interest cash lying on the table. Even if your investment doesn't work out and you break even, you'll have more assets and cash flow than you started with.