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How to Buy Your First House, Pt. 1: The Research Process (Ep. 205)

Last Updated April 2, 2018

Where do you see yourself in five years?

For me, five years ago I would have very passionately told you about how I never wanted a house. I wanted to travel the globe as an internet nomad, armed with nothing but my MacBook Air and a love for languages.

But now, I want a house — probably back in my home state of Iowa. Sorry, stubborn and adventurous younger me.

Aside from learning that those five-year questions are not likely to yield accurate predictions, I suddenly have a lot to think about. How much does a house cost? What type of neighborhood do I want to live in? Is it reasonable to demand an extra room to hide behind a secret bookshelf door?

As Tom and I work to break the millennial curse of not owning a home, we’ll need to answer these questions and more, so we’ll add new episodes to this series as we go through each step of the process ourselves.

This week’s episode isn’t too technical, but it does cover possibly the biggest part of buying a house: realizing that we even wanted to buy one.

Things mentioned in this episode:

This week’s episode is sponsored by:

Backblaze – unlimited cloud backup for PCs and Macs. Don’t be that person who loses all their files permanently when – not if – your computer’s hard drive fails. Get started with a 15-day, full-featured trial at backblaze.com/CIG.

Other things we mentioned:

Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.

Timestamps:

  • 0:00:15 – General overview of what this series will be about
  • 0:05:19 – Our reasons for owning a house and why we moved
  • 0:27:07 – Doing the research and not getting too attached
  • 0:29:53 – Sponsor: Backblaze (Backing up your data)
  • 0:33:29 – Prioritizing what you want in a house
  • 1:04:12 – Don’t rush into a decision
  • 1:06:59 – How to afford a house and not go bankrupt
  • 1:22:21 – Conclusion

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How to Buy Your First House, Pt. 1: The Research Process