When is the best time to build your dream house? (Investor version)
"So when are you guys going to build?"
We've been asked this question quite a few times. Why? We first bought some land (circa 2014) before we were ready to start a family, because it was THE place. And I'm telling you, it was. It was awesome. It was an "architect living in Iowa" dream. Water, trees, rolling landscape, flat landscape, privacy, close to a cute town, DREAM. We had SO MANY plans for that place. We had a lot of fun there, exploring, camping, boating, etc.Lots of people would continually ask, "Did you move? Don't you have some land? When are you going to build?"
Our answer was continually, "Oh, we will. We're not in a hurry. We'll build when it makes sense for our life. We love the place and we look forward to living there when it's the right time."
It wasn't really close to our jobs or current home at the time. But it was THE Place for us when it worked out. We shelled every extra penny into that place for many years, while we still lived in our starter home. We made our way there as often as we could and we kept dreaming about all the plans we had for the day we finally pulled the trigger. We also started our family and loved taking our little ladies down there. Trevor was determined to break them into country girls as early as possible!
Then...someone called. They wanted to buy it. We said HELL NO (Just a little nicer). They called again....ummmm NO. They called again...ummm NO. They called again..."Ummm, what do you know that we don't know?" What was going on? Was this supposed to be a thing? Were we supposed to sell our DREAM? Trevor wanted to talk about. I told him he was crazy!!!The thing that was EXTRA special about this place was that we literally scraped together every penny we could to buy it at the ripe age of 26. We could have much more easily bought the lot next to it, which was half the size, but we knew we would always regret not having this much bigger and more beautiful piece. So we said "Go Big, or Go Home."
How could we sell? How could we let it go? It was everything we had been working towards.
There was something that was more important though. Our kids. Our time with them. Our happiness. And our future.
I decided we could talk about it. I did not know what was ahead of us, but something felt like this was supposed to be our path.
Could we have made it work? Yes. Of course. We honestly weren't far off from building our dream home there. But we would have spent all of our kids' childhood working our butts off at jobs that were no longer making us happy or fulfilled. We didn't feel FREE (stick around- we'll talk about that a lot in this space). The idea of committing to that future did not feel like the best choice for our family. And here was someone who REALLY wanted an amazing asset of ours. We started to flip our mindset about a much bigger future than we ever dreamed of before. We named our price. They said YES. We said YES. And we let it go...
Not even two years later, we were able to get our hands on another beautiful piece of ground. It's also an "Architect living in Iowa" DREAM. We laughed because our purchase price was exactly the same as our first piece of ground, and it's half the size! Lol! But it's beautiful, with water, and trees, and privacy, and rolling landscape.
We've recently been asked, "So when are you going to build?" LOL!
We said, "When the time is right."
Now that we are semi-experienced investors and we know how this works, here's the "investor" response to that question:
"When my money is making me enough money to pay for my dream house, THAT'S when I'll build it. 😉"
Why am I sharing this? Because I know some people want more freedom, just like we do. I'm just here to encourage you...your DREAM is your FREEDOM and living your LIFE. It's not your house.
BUILD YOUR DREAM FIRST.
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