Personally, it took a lot for me to come to this conclusion. Wrapping my head around the numbers and making deciding this may be the right fit for me was hard enough. An equally big part of my struggle has been reconciling feelings of shame and guilt.
My decision goes against what many articles in personal finance community, especially financial independence section, recommend.
I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was thinking about it for years before, but I never made any move. The signs just weren’t there. I didn’t know what to look for. And then reality hit and I bought a place within 4 days of being on the market.
It’s a miracle that everything turned out the way it did really.
A lot of young people always ask me, ‘How do I buy my own home?’ And my first question is like, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ And generally, I think they think #1, it’s cool to own your own home, you can do whatever you want to it! You’re the boss, you don’t have a landlord! But #2, they always say ‘Well, it’s always an investment, right? It’s a good investment.’ And that’s not necessarily true.
People ask me about this rule of thumb fairly frequently because they want to check whether their housing spending makes sense. My response is nearly always the same, and comes swiftly:
An emphatic ‘I hate that rule!’
And I do. I hate that rule.
So whether your home buying journey takes 12 weeks or 6 months, once you understand step-by-step how to plan properly, it demystifies the entire process and provides a clear road-map on how to become a homeowner!