Give me some life feedback

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Are you already maxing out your tax-advantaged retirement plans?

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Maxing 401k and HSA. I'm well on track to meet retirement plans.
Wife is a state employee and will received state retirement benefits.

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Are you moving to get your kids into better school districts?

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We own a lot a mile from where we currently live, in the same school district. The only real reason is to upgrade.

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Is the current area you are in not safe?

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No

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Can you truly afford the new mortgage?

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By my earliest estimates, new mortgage would roughly be no more than 16% of gross monthly income.

I guess my struggle is it all boils down to Want vs Need.

Is it worth throwing your life's savings at it? And for what exactly? Living in a bigger/nicer box?

idk. Just struggling with it lol

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Is it worth throwing your life's savings at it?

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This is an interesting tidbit. Are you leaving yourself a comfortable amount in checking/savings? Granted a new build won’t really have any major maintenance issues for a while.

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Are the wife and kids going to be happier with more space

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Definitely the wife. We've also kicked around the idea of adding on to where we are, but I'm not confident in the foundation. It's got some issues. Fixable issues, but issues. Expanding the bathrooms, building a shop for storage are certainly doable options.

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Are you leaving yourself a comfortable amount in checking/savings

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I'd probably try to keep 10k after it's all said and done just in case...


Anyone ever make this decision and regret it? Wish you would've stayed in the smaller, more inexpensive house?

This ^^^^^^

No such thing

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Particularly looking for folks older than me lol. 35 yo. Married. 2 young kids. Wife and I have been discussing building our "forever" home. Targeting end of next year or Q1 2026. We currently live in a 1,750 sf home that I bought as a "starter" house 10 years ago. It was built in 1983. I bought it for $169k and since living in here have probably put $25k in improvements into it. It's worth $240-250 tomorrow. Am I crazy for having second thoughts of building a brand new 3000sf home, that will probably cost us $600-700k? Should we instead just build a shop at the current house? Maybe add on? There are some clear flaws in the house we're in. Lack of storage. Smaller bedrooms, and a small bathrooms. But idk: The thought of living mortage free, forever, and taking the ~$150k in cash that we probably would put down on the next one and continuing to invest it, honestly sounds kind of nice. What do you guys think?

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I say build it. I’m 43 and started on plans for my “forever home” in June of 2019. 3500 SQFT came in around $675,000 then I added about another 100k to 125k with generator, fencing, pool and hot tub . Just sold it for close to 900k after living in it for 3.5 years and due to a job opportunity that took me to Texas.

I had a nice house before but it didn’t fit what we wanted any longer and I have no regrets building a bigger nicer house.m that fit our needs better. We entertained a lot more in our house than we ever did with a cookie cutter 400k house with a 10x10 back porch.

I’m in the market to do it again or buy something already done.

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I’ve never met a person that’s more happy because they got more house

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I've never met anyone that's happy because they stayed in a small house. Going from ~1700 to 3k sq ft with 2 kids in the house is going to be amazing. 3k sq ft is not that big either.

I was in a similar situation about 10 years ago. Had one kid and planned on having another, but we were in a 1k sq ft house. My closet was in our kids bedroom which also housed the washer and dryer. It was less than ideal. We live in a unique area of Atlanta that's in town but also has it's own school district, which is very good. At the time, 4/3's in the 3k sq ft range were in the 700's and up. Now they're over $1MM. We were better off rebuilding than buying at the time.

We made the decision to tear ours down to the foundation and build a house roughly 3x the size of what we had. It was basically building a brand new house, although we were able to use about 2/3 of the existing foundation, so that did save us a good bit. We immediately gained about $400k in equity, so we could sell and cash in on that if needed. It was a no brainer given our location and the ability to sell at a premium if we needed to.

Based on what the OP said about their financial situation, I say do it. Those kids are going to be bigger and bigger before you know it and having that extra room is going to be amazing for everyone involved.

If you are planning ahead for retirement etc. and it's not a stretch build the house.

I feel like unless you have a very good reason that you want to save the money etc. there is something to be said for being comfortable.

I feel like so many people feel the need to save every dollar that they don't spend and make themselves miserable.

I get that we'd be better off if more people were like that than opposed to the people that need Dave Ramsey badly.

But at the same time you can't take it with you might as well enjoy it while it's here.

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We currently live in a 1,750 sf home that I bought as a "starter" house 10 years ago. It was built in 1983. I bought it for $169k and since living in here have probably put $25k in improvements into it. It's worth $240-250 tomorrow.

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That sounds almost exactly like my situation.

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35 yo. Married. 2 young kids.

Am I crazy for having second thoughts of building a brand new 3000sf home, that will probably cost us $600-700k?

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Crazy? No. On the surface it doesn't sound like a bad idea, but $600k-$700k for 3ksqft sounds a bit high (but I'm not in home-building, so take that for what it's worth).

There are some questions though:

How much do you have left on your current home?
If still paying notes, how much per month?
What's your household take-home pay (ie: after taxes) each month?
How old are the kids?