Should I Avoid Buying a House If My Future Is Uncertain?

Transcript

From Samuel is up next. This is a little, uh, life advice slash financial advice. All right, I’m interested to see what you guys say. As a bachelor in his late 20s, I would like to get married and start a family in the next five years. Should I hold off on buying a house, as my needs will likely change?

Do you know why we’re chuckling? If I could tell you, it’s so fun being a financial planner, and the fact that we deal with all situations. I have, oh my gosh, I immediately have a couple in mind that every time I get on a phone call with them, I feel like I’m their counselor. It’s because they got married later in life. They’re living in the husband’s house. The husband loves this house; he has all kinds of great memories with this house because it was his bachelor house. His wife hates this house. I mean, in every phone call, every meeting we have, it’s “Can we please upgrade the house?” And then I sit there and listen to them bicker back and forth on this whole thing. This isn’t… I could pull up two or three other case studies on this. So, look, Samuel, if you don’t have a significant other and it’s questionable when you will find this person, don’t get in a hurry on that either, by the way. Because, not to be those trolls – because it always amazes me when we talk about anything, marriage is always two or three people – they’re probably in the chat room right now saying, “Never get married.” You know those people are out there. Stay away from getting married. No, I will tell you as a person who’s been married for 25 years, marriage is outstanding if you do it right. Now, there’s a lot of… It doesn’t matter if I had dinner last night. This is how nerdy my family is. I had seen somewhere on social media divorce rates by country, and it was like Russia was like 73% divorce rate. India was so low, well below 10%. South Africa, where we just came back from, was very low. America was at 45%, and we were talking about this. So yes, there are high percentages of divorces in certain countries, but I think you can minimize that if you choose well and measure twice on that partner. But if Samuel is years away from having somebody, so it might be five, seven years in the future, it’s kind of like the house decision. You could probably make it and just know that there might be some hiccups or road bumps with your significant other liking the house decision later. But if you have somebody, maybe you’ve already been dating for a few months or you went on a date last week with somebody, and you’re like, “Man, there’s something about this person,” you might want to slow it down until you see it because I think it’s just human nature. We all like to feel like we were involved with the recipe. I’m sure there’s gonna be somebody out there who has a case where they moved into the house that their significant other had and they loved it, and it’s great. But I’ve seen a lot of turbulence there as well in my financial planning. Yeah, I’ve got two thoughts for you. One, when I bought my first home, it was pre-marriage, and my wife always thought of that house as my house. It didn’t really feel like our house because she wasn’t involved in it. It wasn’t the colors, it wasn’t the stuff, it wasn’t, you know, she was not a huge fan of the eight-dollar Home Depot paper blinds. I thought they were wonderful. You run into these issues, so it is something to know going into it that life circumstances change. Now frankly, as a young unmarried bachelor with no kids, I probably shouldn’t have bought the four-bedroom house and all that. It just didn’t make a ton of sense, even though financially, it was okay. It didn’t make a ton of sense lifestyle-wise. So if you are going to do it, I would say, hey, do it wisely. Maybe don’t buy this house under the guise of, “Hey, this is going to be the house that I raised a family in, that we get all this going.” Maybe you buy a place in your house hack, maybe you buy a place that when you do get married and you do transition, it’s gonna be an asset on your balance sheet at some point in the future. Right now, it’s gonna be the bachelor pad, gonna be where you start building equity, gonna be where you establish yourself, but maybe not the exact house you’re going to be in 15 years from now. So if you can think about the location, the market, the rental stuff, like all those factors that go into it, it’s probably not crazy if you try to, in my opinion, buy the house that you think your spouse, who’s yet to be named, is going to love. Ah, there’s a good chance you’re not gonna nail that one, in my opinion. So if you’re gonna do it, do it in a wise way as you approach making that financial decision.