I second everything said above here. I'm 35 and I'm at my third house. I bought this house before discovering MMM and to be honest, I'm having several doubts. I think I overspent.
I now have a three bedroom house. This basically means we could have two kids. Although I can't look into the future, I doubt we'll receive another child. Thus now we have a 75,000 euro laundry dryer room. Yay... This means more taxes, more maintenance, more debt, higher insurance and less money for higher-yielding investments.
The other thing is that I mentioned to my girlfriend that this house may need to be sold after our daughter goes to college. The girlfriend said she didn't want to give up the luxury of this house. I remarked that it's a trade-off between working longer or less luxury, and that got her thinking.
The last thing is that since buying the house, prices have gone down about 10% which is okay since we're not financed to the hilt. But for a neighbor down the street, this meant taking a severe hit when they had to move due to a terminally ill parent that they wanted to move in with, in order to take care of her.
So my advice would be:
- see if renting is cheaper
- finance on one salary
- buy for the long term
- buy when you're settling down
- don't buy too big
- make sure to get a nice down payment