If you’ve been frugal with your money for most of your life then buying a home can seem like one of the most contradictory decisions you’ll ever have to make. A home is perhaps the single most expensive thing that someone will ever buy in their life. In fact, many people don’t even get the privilege of owning their own home, instead choosing to rent for most of their life or live in a home owned by someone else.
This is fairly typical across the world these days. Rising house prices across the world make it virtually impossible for younger generations to buy a home, and even many of their parents struggle to meet mortgage payments. This is why buying a home can be an extremely contradictory action when compared with your otherwise frugal nature.
But that doesn’t mean you should avoid it.
In fact, buying a home is one of the few decisions a frugal person will need to overcome if they want to live a more comfortable and convenient lifestyle, and here’s how to cope with it.
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Buying a home enables many things in life
Buying a home is something that will help you enable more opportunities in the future. For some people, long distance moving means being able to land a new job that pays better and provides them with more skills and career growth opportunities. The wealth of career possibilities that come with moving often gives you a much better range of options for making and saving money. In fact, you may even find lower house prices in a distant city or even another country, thus helping you save on things like utility bills and rent.
In other words; buying a home enables many more things in life. While there’s no doubt that it’s a huge expense that contradicts your frugal nature, you ultimately need to accept it as a necessary purchase because it paves the way for many other things in life. Whether it’s privacy, starting a family, having something to pass down to your children, or even just securing more job opportunities, it’s an expense worth taking out a loan for.
You can save money with your home purchase if you’re smart about it
And who’s to say that you can’t be savvy with your money when purchasing a home? There are so many different ways to save a buck here and there when shopping for a house that it’ll quickly trigger those frugal instincts of yours. You could buy a run-down home and renovate it yourself for half the price of a more expensive place, you could move to a less expensive part of town, or you can even get yourself on the property ladder by buying a place and renting part of it out to travellers and students.
There are so many ways to be extra frugal if you plan to purchase a home and there’s just not enough space in a single post to go through all of them. Just remember that buying a home can be frugal if you understand how property works and it’ll be more affordable than you think.
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