@fendergirl Long commutes suck. Many people don’t understand the tax advantage of flipping their primary residence every 24 months and pocketing the profits tax-free.
Buy the house you can now afford that has the better location. If or when circumstances change, do it again. If you don’t want to sell, rent it out. Have someone else pay your mortgage and reap the benefits of depreciation.
Many people don’t understand that for a lot of people any increase in value in 24 months (if any) won’t cover the costs of moving.
We built two houses together and absolutely loved both of them. No regrets.
I guess I am very different from most people here as I would never want to be involved in building a house. My home is much smaller than most of you have, but I absolutely love it because of where it is located. I can walk to restaurants, grocery stores, a mall and most of all to the beach!
Just completed our dream retirement home this past February. It turned out to be a pretty painless process considering we did it from 7 hours away from the property. We got lucky with our contractor and foreman whom were in constant contact with us during the process. Also my husband is a Civil engineer with a construction background whom made sure everything was progressing properly throughout the build. Decisions were fairly easy since we both knew what we wanted along with having some friends that had built recently and got a lot of input on what they would have done differently.
All in all we are happy with the outcome. I only have 2 regrets about the build: I would install a sink in the garage for washing up before coming into the house and switching out the tub/shower combo in our Casita guest house to just a full shower.
Can’t wait to permanently move into our new home, unfortunately a few more years till we feel we can completely retire.
Probably not, having gone through many improvements and an addition to this house, because of the decisions and because we DIY a lot of it. And I don’t enjoy the stress of trying to help DH.
I’ve never gotten to house shop though either. This house came as part of DH’s job right after we got married but we’ve made it into something I’m perfectly happy with.
Might interest some reading this thread that there is a shortage of homes on the market at this time. Not sure if this is a national problem or just in a few regions of the US. In light of this, building might need to be considered if definitely moving out of one’s current home.
Yeah, I would never ever want to live somewhere where the homeowners association dictates what I can do, or where I can’t walk to the store, or where I don’t know the names of most of my neighbors. One of the things I realized was that what might have been a fine kitchen when my kids were little was not what I wanted by the time they were young adults. My parents’ dream house was great for them - but when our kids were little I really wished I’d made the guest rooms just a little bit bigger so that the portable cribs had a little space around them!
We didn’t make any money when we sold our old house. Flipping works in some markets, but not in all.
I would never want to build any kind of a house. I remember my parents building when I was younger. First of all, I have a hard time imagining what I would want. Secondly, it’s hard enough to get contractors to do things right in small remodeling projects. I feel like I’m a babysitter. We’ve had 2 new homes in the past; one a spec home, where we only had to choose a handful of finishes and the other a model home. which was really easy.
We also had a friend who built a home. The contractor ended up leaving out a lot of items in the contract. The builder said, “Go ahead and sue me. I’ll declare bankruptcy.”