Back when I was single, I signed up for a weekend course on relationships about finding your life partner.
Weird for a guy, I know, but I’m an optimizer, and if there’s a book or a course on anything I’m remotely interested in, I’ll take it. At that stage in my life, I was ready for kids and marriage, so there I was with two other guys and about fifty women.
It was a full weekend, but I only remember the first exercise: writing down everything you wanted in a partner. It took an hour because we had to think of everything from age to net worth to eye color. Reach, they said. Don’t hold back. What do you want?
After an hour we all had lists of hundreds of attributes. Then the real work began—we had to choose what was truly important. I think they asked us to narrow the list down to three or four characteristics.
Basically, you had to decide what you’d settle for.
I was thinking about it this last week, as Lori and I discussed our next house.
Not that we are thinking of moving necessarily, but over the holidays Lori caught the renovation bug. As these things do, it started with adding an extra bathroom for our daughter and quickly morphed into a full gut renovation.
Which begged the usual question: Maybe we should just move and use that renovation money as a down payment on a new house?
It’s a common debate, one we hear as realtors almost daily, and one that has inspired a dozen HGTV shows (Love it or List it, etc.): Renovate or move?
So there we were, talking about our next house and what it would have to look like to make the move worthwhile.
And we’d have to settle on a handful of things. Even at this stage in our life, there’s no dream home. Fun fact for buyers: whether your budget is $2 million or $10 million, there's no perfect house.
Every home buyer starts with a list of wants, but ultimately settles: size (bed/bath/square footage), location, condition, views, etc. You have your price, then you have to triage. Pick your top three my friend.
Settling is underrated.
