What if a buyer who is concerned about the market says "isn't my home an investment?"

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When you’re buying a home, first off it’s where you’re going to live. That’s not an investment first philosophy – just like the car you bought, the clothes you wear, and the TV you watch. These are things that have to do with your lifestyle, and those are lifestyle decisions that are made. You didn’t contemplate buying a watch as an investment necessarily, you probably thought of it as a lifestyle decision first.



However, you bought a good watch and it lasted a long time. In the end though, it might not appreciate. It actually is an investment of sorts, meaning you made such a good decision you didn’t have to buy another one and you didn’t have to get it fixed. So when we think about buying a home it’s a lifestyle decision first, but it’s an investment of a different nature. It’s an investment in that, you will have to make regular payments on it, and it will force you to put money into it. Now we can’t time when we sell an investment. Timing finds us.



When you make an investment you don’t know when you will get your return back. The great thing about buying a home is that you can wait it out because it’s your home. You need to be thinking when you buy a home 5 – 7 years so that you can catch the cycles and do ok on it. The other thing is that its forced savings, meaning that if you never sold it and made your payments regularly at some point you wouldn’t have to make payments any more, and then you would be able to control where you lived the rest of your life, and it would be a lower cost of living.



Gary Keller