Dear Mustachians,
I'm looking for some advice and your thoughts. In many ways, I'm a very frugal person. I currently save about 40% of my post-tax income. I have no debt other than a mortgage on my house. I bike to work every day and don't buy a bunch of crap. I just started my first real job, so I don't have a ton of savings (~80k). So, I'm on course to save quite a bit over the next few decades, but because I make lots of money (~100k USD), I know I can do much better. Two things really hold me back: food and housing. I have a clear plan for dealing with the food excesses (I cook a lot, but just don't focus on cooking frugally). The housing situation is where I am having trouble. There are two issues:
1) First, I bought a way-too-expensive house a few months ago (~400k, so my monthly payment including PITI is ~2,100). I live in an expensive city, so my isn't a McMansion. At 1000 sqft, I think it's is the right size for me and my partner. Furthermore it would rent for approximately the same as my mortgage payment. So the problem isn't that the house was a bad investment, just that it eats up a sizable fraction of my take-home pay. This makes it hard to hit Mustachian levels of savings. I'm not sure I can do anything about this but ride it out.
2) Second, I had NO idea how much knowledge/work goes into dealing with a home. The house is ~100 years old, but thankfully is in pretty good shape overall. However, there are a bunch of maintenance items that will need to be dealt with in the next five years. The major ones include an ageing furnace, roof, exterior paint, fences/deck and landscaping. I budgeted for outsourcing these maintenance items (~12k/yr), but I would love to recapture some of that budget by avoiding outsourcing. However, two factors are against me. First, I have limited time because I work a demanding job (60+ hr/week). That means I can probably only contribute ~10 hr/week to working on my house. Second, I have lived in apartments my whole life and have little skill in building/painting/mowing/growing/etc. So, how I can invest the hours I do have most effectively? What can I safely experiment with and what should I stay away from because of the potential cost of screwing things up? What big mistakes loom on the DIY vs outsourcing horizon?
Any thoughts or pointers to resources would be most welcome.