I had to double check that the original post wasn't made on April 1st, just in case this was a clever joke.
OP, there are so many questionable things about this decision and I think, or at least hope that you realize that. If anything, I will post my rant here on the off chance that someone else contemplating a similar decision reads it before it's too late.
As for the posters who agreed with you, as someone said before, did I log onto the DC Urban Moms forum by accident?
I should post this link first I guess, assuming I am in the right forum:
How (and How Not) to Buy a House:
"I am not buying a flowery pillowcase of emotions or a future of warm memories. I am conducting a business transaction to purchase a piece of land and an assembled collection of construction materials."I've been renting for my whole career, and since I am getting married and planning on starting a family I decided I needed to buy a house.
This is a red flag right here.
Now perhaps things are different in the South, and there is a law that says you have to buy a house once you get married or think about having kids (the Realtors are a powerful lobby..) but in most places I'm familiar with, there is no such law. There might be a social assumption that you have to, and perhaps that is how everyone does it, but it does not mean you need or should unless it makes sense for your particular situation.
If you want to make sound financial decisions, it makes sense to question the received societal wisdom, and instead concern your self with
conscious spending.
Just from a financial comparison, you want to
compare the costs of buying vs renting, and make sure you consider all the factors including
opportunity costFor all the people saying there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice house. I agree, that is an area we splurge on as well. But in this case the OP didn't state it was a nice house, he him/herself calls it a
McMansion:
"judged to be oversized for its parcel, or incongruous and out of place for its neighborhood.. which prizes superficial appearance over quality.. builder may have attempted to achieve expensive effects with cheap materials, skimped on details, or hidden defects ... using materials that give an ugly, over the top and exaggerated appearance" (Wikipedia's words, not mine).
As for the idea of buying the house you want to be for a long time, I'm not really sure I follow either. Sure housing has high transaction costs, but there are also huge carrying and maintenance costs associated with a house larger than you need. I might understand wanting to plan for extra bedrooms if you were a few months away from adopting several kids and animals at once, but that doesn't sound like that case here. A child is an idea you are thinking of, that hasn't happened yet, and if/when it does, you don't know where you will be in life or what else would have changed.
Sure, moving is a little bit of a pain, but you spend one weekend packing up your boxes, and one weekend with some friends moving your furniture. It is only a huge pain if you've allowed your possessions to consume you and take over your life. If you have a reasonable amount of stuff, moving is a hassle, but not the end of the world.
Here are a couple of good links of people who moved and downsized, you can save your self the trouble by not getting into that situation in the first place:
This seems apt, given your username:
REJECT LIFESTYLE INFLATION:
"If you’ve already succumbed to lifestyle inflation: that’s OK. I did too. It’s not a life sentence to working a job you hate for things you don’t want. The entire description above was me, literally (including the 3189 sq ft house with pool in a fancy neighborhood). But then I found a way out. I created my own lifestyle deflation. I downsized my house, moved close to work, sold my car, got rid of the money-sucking pool, and much more. And life got better. Way better. Now that I’ve seen the inflated life and the simple life, I know that there’s no going back."HOW I PULLED IN MY EARLY RETIREMENT BY 20 YEARS:
"I sold my McMansion and purchased a much smaller house in my new town.It’s also worth noting that within a month we had more good friends in the neighborhood than we had after 8 years in our old neighborhood. I credit this to the type of people that live in a lower income neighborhood as compared to a McMansion neighborhood.Mistakes Were Made:
"I overspent on a house. I was eager to get a place with my significant other, and at the time we thought we might have children together, so we paid a lot of money for a place with enough space to accommodate both if we had 2 kids. And we did this in one of the most expensive areas of the country...Pissed away. Blown to the wind, never to be recovered. And I don’t think that living in those places did anything to improve or change my levels of happiness or so-called quality of life. All it’s done is made me work several years longer than I have to...At any rate, my wife and I are working on downsizing within the next 12-15 months to correct this problem. It’s likely that we won’t buy our next house."In case the decision has been made and finalized, I wish you the best and hope it works out well and you manage to live up to your username in other endeavors :)
