Reply to Why is DCUM SO conservative with housing?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t get why you wouldn’t *want* to be conservative about it, ideally.

Don’t you like to take vacations, have (possibly expensive) hobbies, go out to dinner, concerts, theater, bars with friends, have kids? Plus, you know, save.

All of that takes money.[/quote]

OP here. I’ve always worked from home so a huge portion of my life is spent in my house. I would much rather spend discretionary income on a nice house than on nights on the town or hobbies which occupy a relatively small portion of my life.

Also, barring financial catastrophes that force you to sell at inopportune times, you get back much of your housing expense due to appreciation. A $1.6 million house that appreciates 4% per year is earning you $64,000/year at first (more later on as compounding takes over). That might roughly cover your interest, taxes and insurance (all but the “principal” in PITI). Of course, you do still have maintenance expenses. But assuming you put 20% down ($320,000), where else are you consistently earning 64K on a 320K investment?? And you get the higher quality of life thrown in there![/quote]

Bingo. All the nonsense on here or where ever where people spin how smart it is to buy a "conservative" or "modest" home is a cope. I know a lot of rich people, none of them live in a modest house. That's not to say they live in tacky homes, but you know what I mean. Always go big and always go for the most premier hot zip code you can. Life is short and those who swing for the fences get rewarded the most in America.[/quote]

The problem with these convos is that we’re all talking past each other because none of us have pictures. We live near Boston in a “modest” house for our income at 2500 sqft (4 bec, 2.5 bath) but it’s in a great neighborhood in a close in suburb with excellent public schools. At the time that we bought it, we were childless and dog-less and we went for “charm” and curb appeal over space. There were points over the years as we added our 3 children and a big dog to our family that we wondered if we should move.

Are there things I’d like to have that I can’t in our small house? You bet. I’d love a huge yard for our dog to run around in, a dedicated mud room, and another bedroom for a dedicated home office. But, whenever we talk about it, we keep coming back to the same things and deciding that the positives outweigh the negatives: the neighborhood itself is lovely, our kids have a bunch of same age friends who they play with for hours outside like it’s still the 70s (this is priceless), I can take our dog to a nearby dog park, we live close enough to be able to walk to the schools, library, playground, some cafes, etc. and we are mortgage free which allows us to redirect our old debt repayments to the kids’ college funds. We also have enough money left over after bills and savings goals to travel 4-5x a year and do expensive hobbies like tennis, golf, and skiing. We could afford to move to a bigger house but we don’t want to give up the positives that we have here.

I don’t think we are fooling ourselves or trying to cope.[/quote]

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