Buying a House at 18 - First Time Home Buyer Experience

Share your thoughts on buying your first home down below.
Buying a home at a young age can be a great financial step but it also has risks involved. I’m going to give some advice from my own experience on what it was like buying a home at a young age, what it means to be a first time home buyer, and especially being a first time home buyer at 18.

Now a lot of this advise I’m going to give doesn’t just apply to a young age group but actually applies to any first time home buying, or even second time home buyer. I think its important for people in this age group to realize that there are certain vulnerabilities or blinds spots that you may have.

It really boils down to being overly eager, thinking I knew everything about buying a home and when its a good decision, and misplacing trusts in others to be more interested in my life than them being self interested in their own life.

I’m not saying 100% of realtors or mortgage lenders are like this, but in general, these people are in the business to make THEM money. They want you to buy a home as quickly as possible and buy a home as close to the top of your budget as possible.

As a new home buyer, you don’t have much context on how expensive certain things are and how much something will bother you. For example, there was a small crack in the driveway and while it didn’t really bother me at the time, it did bother me later. My realtor downplayed the issue plus growing up I remember cracks on driveways so I thought, no big deal. It wasn’t until later that I started to worry about people maybe tripping over the crack or that grass starts to grow in there making the driveway not look as nice, which hurts curb appeal.

When buying a home at 18, you need to really be certain that a home is what you want, its not a spur of the moment type thing. It’s a million times harder to change life choices when you have a home. You have a mortgage to pay, its not as easy to switch jobs, you can’t move to a new city year after year like you could with an apartment. Everything you do, there’s a lot more pressure to make sure you have a stable income.

And when you’re young, or even if you’re 29 for example, you haven’t even been alive for as long as a 30-year mortgage would take to pay off. So, the typical advice is that you shouldn’t buy a home if you plan on moving within 5 years, some say 3, but regardless, 5 years may seem like a short time to you, but that can be a long time when you’re working a repetitive job, which is much different than when you’re young.

If you are 18 and in a position to be able to buy a home, great for you, you must have done the work to have a stable income and made the sacrifice to save enough for a decent down payment. But sometimes this success can lead to arrogance or believing that you don’t need any advice from anyone and you know what you’re doing.

Hopefully my advice allows you to learn from my mistakes but in the end, any first time home buyer will always feel that there were mistakes they made and that's ok. Its about learning and becoming better the next time you buy a house.

Видео Buying a House at 18 - First Time Home Buyer Experience канала Financial Lift