A couple of years ago I applied to refinance my student loans with SoFi.  They offer loan rates much lower than the 6.875% I pay on my federal student loans. They promptly rejected my application due to my debt to income ratio. I don’t blame them for that. I wouldn’t make a six figure loan to someone with my level of income either.

Earlier this year I thought I would apply to SoFi again. Since I’m a blogger, I signed up for their affiliate program with the thought that I could do a post documenting my application process and include some affiliate links. That way I could save money from getting my loan refinanced and make money with the affiliate links. That didn’t work out. They promptly rejected me again. This time I didn’t even fill out a full application. I assume that is because they used the previous information they had. On the plus side, they didn’t even pull my credit so there was no hard pull on my credit. Since I only filled out part of an application, I wasn’t able to document what the application process would be like for a first-time applicant. Thus, there was no post and no affiliate links.

That isn’t the reason you should not use my SoFi affiliate links though. If you sign up using one my SoFi affiliate links like this one -> Find My Rate No origination fees or pre-payment penalties. I’d get $100-$150 commission and you would get nothing but a refinanced loan. If you signed up through this referral link, I’d get a $300 bonus and you would get a $100 bonus. The referral link is better for both of us than the affiliate link. That is one reason you wouldn’t want to use my SoFi affiliate link That still isn’t the only reason why you shouldn’t use my affiliate link though.

The reason you shouldn’t use my SoFi affiliate link or my SoFi referral link is because there is an even better deal out there. If you go to Mr. Money Mustache’s SoFi review he has a referral link that will give you a $300 bonus. Since a $300 bonus is better than a $100 bonus that is the referral link you should use when you sign up. Although I want to make money with my blog I can’t recommend anyone use my affiliate link paying you $0 or my referral link paying $100 when I know there is a $300 referral link out there. If you are too lazy to click over to the SoFi review, you can use Mr. Money Mustache’s referral link right here. https://www.sofi.com/mrmoneymustache/

If you still want to sign up for SoFi using my affiliate link or referral link I appreciate it, but I don’t think it is very smart.

I am in the process of buying the house that you should see pictured to the left of this text. This was somewhat of an impulse decision. There have been several times in the past few years that I considered buying a house, but I decided not to try since I figured I wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage with only having seasonal employment. Now that I have a full-time job that isn’t seasonal that isn’t a problem anymore. I hadn’t really been planning on buying a house this year though. If I had been, I wouldn’t have paid so much towards my student loans and would have delayed contributing to my IRA and 401k. All of that money would have been helpful to have for the down payment and closing costs.

The house I’m buying cost $98,000 and I’m putting 5% down. Since I’m only putting 5% down, I will have to pay PMI and my mortgage rate is a little higher. Unfortunately, 5% is all I can afford to put down since I was paying down my student loan and putting money in retirement savings rather than saving up a down payment. I considered taking $10,000 out of my IRA since I’m allowed to take that amount out penalty free as a first-time homebuyer. I decided against it since I’m 50 years old and I don’t have that much in my retirement savings. I’d rather have a larger mortgage than deplete my retirement savings. Hopefully, this house purchase will prove to be a good financial decision.

I am taking out a 30-year mortgage on the house. That seems like an awfully long time considering I’ll be 80 years old (or more likely dead) by the end of the mortgage term. The lender seemed to think that the payment on a 15 year mortgage would be too high for my income. If rates stay low I’ll consider refinancing in a few years once I’ve built up some equity and/or have a higher income. My monthly payment will be about $660 with insurance and taxes. That is more than I pay for my apartment, but a lot cheaper than it would cost me to rent a house.

The house is rather small at 780 square feet. It has two bedrooms, one bath, living room, dining room, kitchen and an unfinished basement. The bedrooms are pretty small. The dining room is bigger than the bedrooms which seems backwards to me. Unfortunately, I can’t easily turn the dining room into a bedroom. Although the house is perfectly livable as is, there are a lot of things I want to change about it. I’ll worry about those after the home purchase is completed. I’ll be pretty broke once I’ve paid the down payment and closing costs so there won’t be any big changes for a while. Although a 780 square foot house is small, I’m living in a 180 square foot apartment so I’ll need to get some furniture for the house. I’ll probably be spending almost all my money on the house and house related purchases for the rest of the year. Spending all of that money is tough for a tight-fisted miser, but it will be worth it to have my own home.