The title of this post summarises (albeit a bit clumsily) why I made the decision to buy a CHEAP house NOW rather than gradually stack money to buy a more expensive one later.
The later had been my plan for most of this year - to just gradually save a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month (my income is pretty variable!) for the next year or two and then buy a property at around the EU 40-50K mark sometime in 2024 maybe.
HOWEVER, I changed my mind this weekend, literally over the course of one weekend, and just bought the cheap, unideal house next door to where I'm currently renting and, you know, I feel pretty happy about it.
I've got more than the amount of money it costs to buy it just kicking about and I just have this inkling that buying something cheap NOW is the way to go.
This is because I think (I maybe wrong) that property prices are going to go up fairly fast around here because of so many foreigners buying up wrecks - to give you some kind of context Penamacor, where I bought this house is quite a small town (it only has one major supermarket for example) - and there are just so many foreigners looking to buy property - a friend of mine just bought TWO in one go, that's after buying two before that and already owning her main house.
And I know of SEVERAL other people looking to buy town houses.
And as a friend of mine put it - all the many people who are currently off-gridding on cheap land in the area will at some point want a town house when they get too old to lug their shit about.
So I just get this feeling that had I waited to buy, I'd have my fiat amount just sitting in my bank account, growing, but probably not as fast as the cost of the houses I'd be looking to buy!
Playing Catch up Sucks....
Had I waited I'd be playing 'catch up' for the next two years - NB I did this about 15 years ago when I was saving for my first flat in the UK - saving, saving: £10K, then £!2K, then £!5K and all the time watching the minimum deposit amount increase precisely in line with my savings...
It sucked and if it wasn't for a part-buy scheme - new builds for KEY WORKERS that came to the area I worked I may never have gotten on the property ladder.
I think property prices in the UK are going to trend down now (they've got nowhere else to go!) but here where it's cheaper I can only see prices going up - as more and more people are likely to come here precisely because it's cheap, there's no sign of that process letting up, none at all.
So rather than playing catch up again I opted to get on the local ladder NOW and I can renovate the wreck I've bought as I go - of course the cost of building materials and labour will also go up over time, but I will feel that much less than just waiting to buy something outright.
And if I do want to buy something more expensive in a couple of years time I've now got an asset that's likely to appreciate in value in line with those more expensive houses... probably not as quickly (a slight polarisation is more likely) but better than with just holding dirty fiat slowly sinking in value relative to property.
And I've got a house NOW to start renovating (another one), so plenty to keep me busy!
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