Food for thought – he doesn’t get into the benefits of raising kids in the same home, which probably warrants a paragraph or two – see comment section too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/the-home-buying-decision.html
I’ve been thinking about the big decisions in life: How do people choose careers, colleges, spouses and towns. Of those decisions, buying a home ranks with the most difficult.
It is difficult emotionally. Like a lot of the biggest decisions, it is more emotional than coldly rational. People generally don’t select a house; they fall in love with it.
Part of that falling-in-love process is aesthetic: the sense you get within 10 seconds of walking into a place that it just feels happy and right. Part is aspirational: When people fall in love with a house, they aren’t really falling in love with the walls and the roof; they are falling in love with a beautiful vision of their future lives.
Read full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/the-home-buying-decision.html
“When people fall in love with a house, they aren’t really falling in love with the walls and the roof; they are falling in love with a beautiful vision of their future lives.”
They are falling in love with the thought of their life unfolding within those walls and with that roof (and that location). If they have a family, they see their kids growing up in that space for at least a certain amount of time.
^ That’s my two cents because every house I owned I fell in love with within the first 15 seconds. We built two homes–one in Hawaii–and later, another home in Bend, OR, but even as we built them, I held that future vision of my family there…
There’s sometimes a dark side to buying high end homes.
When I was a kid, my parents built a middle-class home they could easily afford. They later built two vacation homes in Lake Arrowhead, hired a German architect who did an amazing job, had a dock with a ski boat, dirt bikes, sail boats, etc. We’d spend all summer up there. We also rarely ate meals at home. Always went to resturants, since nobody liked to cook.
Most of my friends lived in upper-middle class, to rich areas, and none had anything else, never took any vacations. The were house poor, and their kids paid for it, because they were perpetually broke. My friends marveled at the excess cash we had, vacations we’d take, cars we drove, while they were broke, and their families were stressed about cash flow all the time. We never worried.
I recall a friend once asking me,”how come your parents live in a middle-class neighborhood, but always drive a luxury car?” I countered, “How come your parents live in a rich neighborhood, but always drive a piece of sh*t?”