Buying your dream home won’t fix your problems – but this might
“You must live in a big house, right?” He asked me curiously. I was visiting South India on a volunteer trip with a group of college students. Part of the experience included staying overnight in a small village on the outskirts of the city.
The next morning I was invited to breakfast at one of the families’ home.
It was a small hut; It was a makeshift kitchen area with a small area on the floor for a fire (no stove) and a combined living room area (no bed, just mats on the floor). There was no bathroom inside; They went out and squatted in the middle of the fields.
His question surprised me. At the time, I was living in a two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment with my family, and it felt cramped, especially compared to my friends who lived in larger houses.
I suddenly felt strange. I nodded. I guess I lived in a ‘big house’. It was a moment that showed me how much of what we think we ‘need’ is based on comparison. My ‘cramped’ flat suddenly felt like a palace.
I was reminded of this moment last week when I was reading an article about a family who decided to ‘deprive’ their children of the backyard and move into a ‘claustrophobic box’ (i.e. an apartment).
We have an expectation that external upgrades will solve internal problems.
Now this is not a “be glad others have less” post. It’s not even a “Don’t chase big dreams, be happy with what you have” article. I actually think aspiration is a good thing.
However, what I often see in my work is the significant financial stress people take on to renovate their homes in the hope that it will change their lives in a meaningful way – and often it doesn’t.
The desire for a larger, more beautiful home is understandable. It is a heavily marketed status symbol that has become an indicator of how financially successful someone is. Wanting a bigger, nicer home has become so normal that we don’t think twice if the opportunity arises to afford it.
Extra room, kitchen renovation, apartment renovation, new furniture; If you can afford it, it seems like a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want these?
But what people often encounter is that home improvement doesn’t always have as meaningful an impact on their long-term experience and quality of life as they expected.
You have a backyard, but now you’re squabbling with your spouse over a bigger house. You have the extra room, but now there’s another area where your teenager can avoid you.
You have your ‘dream home’ – but somehow, the ‘dream life’ you thought it would be hasn’t arrived. Life seems more or less the same as before, only in nicer surroundings.
The problem is that we have an expectation that external upgrades will fix internal problems. We are considering a bigger house and assume that this will come with a more luxurious life, a happier family or a better social life because you now have more space.
But each of these are actually separate goals and have nothing to do with your home. They don’t come with house keys or finished renovations. Something I work on with clients is strengthening their relationship with spending and achieving more meaningful results with their spending.
One exercise that helps is this: Separating the physical thing you buy from the emotional experience or quality of life improvement you want or expect it to deliver to you. These are much more difficult questions because they don’t always have easy answers.
Maybe you don’t really want a new kitchen; You want more connection at the dinner table. Maybe it’s easier to focus on a new backyard rather than fixing the ongoing cold wars. Maybe an extra room won’t help as much as marriage counseling.
These are much more uncomfortable questions to ponder and harder solutions to buy into. You can renovate your kitchen in a few months and a few thousand dollars, but do you want to create a more harmonious family dynamic or a home filled with happy memories? It’s not that simple.
But this is the line of research that is more likely to lead to expenses that will have a meaningful impact on your life in the long run; It’s the kind of expense that changes not only how your life looks, but what your life looks like. feels.
These are questions that start to give you a clearer picture of the kind of life you really want; not just the ‘things’ you want to buy, but the hope that they will come with the life you secretly want.
There comes a point when external upgrades don’t make as meaningful an impact on your life as internal ones. So how would you spend money differently if the goal was a happier home rather than just a bigger, nicer house?
Paridhi Jain is a money and mindset coach who combines practical strategies with mindset transformation to help clients create wealth, greater freedom and fulfillment in work and life.
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Paridhi Jain is the founder of the financial education platform SkilledSmart, which has helped hundreds of adults become financially confident by teaching them practical strategies for managing, saving and investing their money.
