Friday, March 18, 2011

Wants and Needs-our journey

I was thinking today about wants and needs. And trying to decide the difference. This is something we teach our kids, or at least try to teach them, even at small age. My daughter is 5 and we talk a LOT about wants and needs. I want her to know the difference.

But as adults... it does seem like sometimes we don't know the difference!

My husband and I rent. It's a house...but its also a duplex. We are connected to a person who is an AWESOME neighbor. We are so blessed to have great people that live around us. Anyway--we'd like to buy a house. We both owned houses in our previous marriages and yes having a house seemed like nothing. It's just what we did and we took it for grantit...soooo easy to do! We'd like to buy at some point but I was thinking today about how cool it would be to buy a house again. But I also thought about this...

If i bought a house i'd still:
be out in the front yard playing with my daughter
have a grill out back with good ol' food on it
come home and clean and do laundry
gripe about wanting to remodel or redo something
sigh really deeply when I wrote out my check for it
and it would still feel like home...

for us, on this financial journey, renting is best for us. yes, one day we WILL buy and that will be a fun and exciting time for us. But for now... i'm just glad that I have my wants and needs in check.

I WANT a house...but I NEED a roof over my head
I WANT to have land to ride my 4-wheeler...but I need a safe neighborhood.
I WANT a big back yard but I just need room to run and play with Ava.
I WANT to have a cutely decorated home and thats EXACTLY what I have.

For me, where we live IS home. It's not fancy and it looks just like the "house" right next to us :) But it's home...and right now this is EXACTLY where I want to be.

I'm not knocking people that own their own homes. GREAT investment. We pay WAYYYY too much to be renting every month but it makes sense for us right now.

So... what are your wants and needs? is there some common ground in the middle?

1 comment:

Kara said...

Well we bought our house 5 years ago and it has depreciated by about 11,000. We may have to sell it soon and take a huge loss. So, it's wonderful to be renting right now in this economy. If we do sell, the loss is going to cause this to be like renting for 5 years. Anyway, just something to add positivity to renting!

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