How to Control the Emotions of Home Buying

Buying a home is almost always an emotion-based process. Once you find a home you like, you become emotionally attached to it. Emotional attachment can cause you to make unwise decisions when making an offer, handling negotiations, and so forth. Once you’ve fallen in love with a house and visualized it being your home, you’ll start to do WHATEVER it takes to make sure it becomes your home.

This is about the worst possible way to buy a home, but also may be the best possible home for you.  You do want to fall in love with your new home, but you also want to be careful.

You can literally cost yourself thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars, by being too emotionally attached. Instead of letting emotions rule the game, try to include some common sense in the buying process. Real estate investors have a saying that goes, “Don’t fall in love with the house, fall in love with the deal.” This is easier for an investor as he won’t live there, but you should be aware of this, and use your head.

Having said that, I realize that you will always have some emotional attachment to your house. You need to like it. Your goal is to strike a balance between liking the house and using common sense to tell you whether you are sacrificing too much to try to get the house. If you find you have to make lots and lots of compromises to get a house, stop yourself and ask, “Is this really worth it?”

Remember to strike a balance between emotions and common sense in your home buying process. It will help you enjoy your home that much more once you actually move in.

As they say in real estate, the three most important things to consider when buying a home is location, location, location. Once you have established what you need and want in a home, you need to decide where to look for a home.

1. School District: There are some important components to location when making this decision. If you have children, one of the big ones is the school district. If your children are already in school, you need to decide if you want to stay in the same school district so they don’t have to change. If they aren’t yet in school, you want to consider what school district you prefer, and specifically what schools in the district you want them to attend. Historically, homes in good school districts appreciate better and hold their value better than equivalent homes with poorer quality schools. This makes school selection not just an important investment in your children, but also an important investment in your home.
2. Work: Another important location factor to consider is proximity to work. Given the uncertainty of the cost of gasoline, commuting costs are definitely worth factoring in. It’s also important to factor in the amount of time your commute takes. If you live an hour away from where you work, not only are the gas costs going to be enormous, but that means two hours per day of driving, which is a lot of extra time away from home.
3. Lifestyle: Amenities are also important when deciding on location. How close do you want to be to the grocery store, your favorite restaurants and your favorite entertainment locations? Long travel times to get to these locations is not just inconvenient, but adds to gas costs too. In some cases, if you are trying to cut down on dining out to save money, you might want to move just a bit farther away from your favorite restaurants so you are less likely to frequent them.
4. Safety: The last location factor to take into account is crime. For the sake of the safety of you and your family, the lower the crime rates, the better. It will also affect the long-term value of your home. If you live in a high crime area, appreciation rates will be slower and in a down market, your home will decline in value faster. Larger cities tend to have higher crime rates than small towns, so you can’t compare the crime rate in San Francisco, California to Cheboygan, Michigan. However, many cities have good and bad neighborhoods. As a general rule, the better the neighborhood, the better off you are.

In summary, you want a house that is in the best school district, a five minute or less commute to work, close to all of the best amenities and in a zero crime neighborhood. If you find one, let me know because I’m not sure they really exist. Obviously, when you add all of these factors together, selecting the location for your home is a series of compromises. You want good schools, but you don’t want that to put you an hour away from work. You want to be close to amenities that are important to you, but not too close if it means you have to settle for a high crime neighborhood, and so on.

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