Friday, June 19, 2009

Priorities vs Opportunities

I've been thinking about the balance of priorities and opportunities a lot lately. Mostly it has been brought on by our search for a new home. I thought it would be fairly straightforward: go looking, find one that suits our current needs, sell current home, purchase new home, voila! All done!

Not so! Starting out on the property search has made us aware that we probably don't want to turn around in another couple of years and go through this all again, so we better find a home that will do us for the next 5 to 10 years (anyone who knows us well will remember hearing this familiar phrase before!).

This still sounds a fairly simple proposition, but our financial situation means we could try to buy at a similar price point as our current property and invest elsewhere, or buy a more expensive property using all our finances and "invest in ourselves"... or we could buy a block of land now and build later...

Part of our caution at the moment has been brought about by a valuation on our property which was a little lower than we were hoping... due to the economic slump of course! Does this mean we should choose not to sell now, or is our original thinking for selling more important than our potential financial gain if we ride out the slump?

We were looking at moving to improve our feeling of being settled in our new suburb. How important is the financial gain in the long run: worth considering or not the main thing?

Love to hear your ideas!

1 comment:

  1. I always think we should be smart with money, and be responsible stewards, but at the end of the day money is just money. Personally I don't think we should pursue financial gain if it comes at too high an emotional cost. If you're miserable - move! As the Mum, you're the emotional centre of your home. A happy Mummy makes for a happy family :)

    ReplyDelete