This is something that I learnt the hard way. Mostly people think that they need a house no matter whatever they spend. It is a typical Indian thing that people go for an investment in buying a house after they are done with their marriage. Some people even go for it before the marrage and it has now become a trend to have a house. There is this different set of people who are against purchasing a house and instead rent the house. This is a never ending debate and my cousin used to have this argument a lot with me. I don't understand why they think renting is better when they can spend 40k on an EMI than spending 25k in a rent. They see the remaining 15k as savings some how. But yeah as I said it is a never ending topic and we cannot possibly get a solution to that easily.
I was also thinking of building a dream house when I was ready to invest on a house and I bought it. But during the process, some people said that I should demolish my existing house and build a brand new house with all the dream features that I wanted. I was also very keen on that and I was exploring this for a very long time. We had water problems in the house and we had so many things to consider. Relatives were heavily suggesting to rebuild the existing house and not invest on any other property. I was also almost ready for this and I started exploring new house ideas with my wife.
But there was this one friend who gave me a thought. He said that if I purchase a new property, I will be having two properties in hand and if I renovate the same house, I will be having only one property and would be sitting inside the house. In both the cases there will still be an outstanding loan. Thankfully I started thinking more on this thought and I decided to purchase a new house and today I don't regret the decision. For the existing house where we live, I spent a few lakhs to renovate the house and it is pretty decent right now. The new flat that I had purchased has been rented out. So I'm able to get a small revenue from the flat which is reducing my EMI burden.
There are a few considerations in this though:
- I should have bought a smaller flat or two small flats for the price that I paid.
- I could have also gone for a second hand flat that's in a good condition but maybe getting a fresh one was also a good thing.
- I should have purchased a house with some land in it. The current flat has only a small portion of UDS. In the future it may not have a great value as the buildings don't have value.
- There were a few duplex house options available and I should have gone for that.
Though these are some considerations, I don't regret buying the flat because it is very big and good and tomorrow if I have to go there with my family, I can always go there and live. Now to conclude and align with the title, I would say that the first purchase should not always be a dream home because we might lack the knowledge to start with. But if we go for a normal property at first and then gradually think about the dream house, we will be able to gather the ideas that we would need. This way when we are fully ready, we can go for the dream house that we want to build.
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