What do you think of my house purchase decision?

I try my best to make the smartest decisions for my family and there are times where I think we did good on our house choice, and other times where I think oh man did I overspend…

Married in our early 30s, and are a single income family. I currently make about $100k/yr after taxes, healthcare, 401k ($500/mo), and HSA ($1k/mo). This equates to about $8k/mo take home.

I have 4 kids, all under 7. We just moved from out of state for my job and were looking for a home to settle into. Good (public) schools were a priority and being close to town was key as well, as we wanted to raise our kids in a neighborhood where they could hang with friends nearby and have access to parks/stuff to do. I knew this was gonna drive up price.

At this point, we have no debt, maybe $15k in savings, 2 paid off cars, and $75k in retirement. I was able to use a VA loan for our home and paid $0 down. Interest rate 6.125%. I don’t own any other property or equity elsewhere.

We bought a house that was built in 2007, that’s been rented for the last 10 years and was a little rough around the edges, but it offered the size and features we were looking for. It cost us $563k. It’s big enough for our whole family, 5 bedrooms and 3,000sq feet. With zero money down, it’s about $3.7k/mo. So it’s roughly half of my $8k/mo take home.

Sure, we can live off the remaining $4k.. but it doesn’t leave us with much room to start building our savings, especially with having to do some improvement projects around the house. I can’t help but feel like holy shit what did I get myself into.

I’m hard on myself because I know that it probably wasn’t the smartest financial move. I know it makes my family happy, but at the end of the day I am the financial manager of the home, and if I was more adamant about buying a more cost savvy home that was maybe a little tighter, it could have maybe gave us more flexibility to save and invest to set ourselves up even better later.

My goal now is to find outside ways to add to my income so I can continue to expand my financial security. At this point it’s not a lot of wiggle room for a 30 year mortgage. I only see my salary going up by maybe $10k realistically over the next 5 years without adding a side job.

Given the family circumstances, what do you think of the financial decision l made? Did I put myself in a vulnerable spot financially, or was it a reasonable decision?