Partner and I bought a house earlier this year, yay! Unfortunately due to a lack of familial wealth on either side, there's no option to run to the Bank of Mom and Dad if anything goes south.

With that in mind, we purposely bought a house that cost less than what we were approved for. The house itself seemed to be solid, and a home inspection turned up nothing of note. Our paychecks currently alternate being used to restock our RRSPs and contribute to our "house fund" i.e. bills, property taxes, tools etc. Our emergency fund, previously thought of as the "emergency cat fund", has been untouched. Life looked good. We were homeowners now! We can fix our own stuff instead of getting ignored by our landlord!

Cut to today, less than two months after taking possession of our new house. Water is flooding into my office from a recessed light in the ceiling. No visible leaks or flooding in the bathroom above, which means there's probably a leak somewhere between the floor of the bathroom and the ceiling of my office. The bathroom and my office are both cordoned off, electricity to the office has been cut and a plumber has been called. This absolutely sucks, and as painful as it is to have to fork over the money for the house so soon after forking over the down payment and all those closing costs on this house, we're glad we didn't go for the more expensive, "we-can-kind-of-afford-this-on-paper" houses because then we truly would have been underwater.

ETA: thank you for everyone mentioning home insurance! My partner handles those bills and neither of us had thought of it, but it turns out we should be covered. We'll see if it's worth going through insurance bc currently there's no visible damage on the ceiling and thankfully it didn't leak onto my shelves and electronics. But it looks like the cats might get to keep their emergency fund this time 🙂