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There’s a difference between functional housing and dream housing. Functional housing provides the bare necessities while dream housing provides all the modern conveniences and wraps them up in a whole lot of class and style. It’s the difference between floors covered with linoleum and floors covered with Brazilian walnut hardwood.
Now, to further drive home the distinction between functional housing and dream housing, I decided to include some YouTube videos.
Functional housing can be summed up with the term “just enough”—as in just enough to get the job done. There are no bells and whistles in functional housing, just amazing economical utility. Here are some examples of what I mean:
Dream housing, on the other hand, is HGTV housing or billionaires’ row housing—it goes way beyond necessity and bathes the homeowner in a level of opulence that most of the world’s inhabitants can scarcely imagine. Here are some examples:
There’s nothing wrong with dream housing, of course, providing you can afford it. And this one little axiom escapes the ken of far too many Americans. In other words, too many Americans that should be in housing that skews functional are actually in housing that skews dream. The end result of this mismatch is economic weakness. We’ll get into the main peril of economic weakness shortly, but for now, I just want to present “Stop It” rule number three. Here it is:
Stop It Rule Three: Stop buying dream housing before you’re financially ready.
If you’re in dream-skewed housing and have neither a six- to nine-month emergency fund nor a savings rate of 15 percent or greater, “stop it!” You’re over-housed. Granite countertops aren’t for you. You’re laminate countertops all the way, baby, and you need to downsize your housing ASAP.
Just why you need housing that doesn’t impede your ability to build wealth is rather grim. Scum prey on economic weakness, and there’s a lot of scum in business and government. If you’re not economically strong and well on your way to having FU money, you’re going to be the bitch of some boss or bureaucrat. Your boss wants you to take a vaccine you don’t want? Oh, well—buying that fashionable house in that fashionable neighborhood means you have to roll up your sleeve. The edu-fascists at your childrens’ school want your children to be ashamed of their skin color? Too bad—having a mortgage that requires two full-time wage earners means you can’t home-school your children and you have to forfeit their dignity as well as your own.
Dream-skewed housing isn’t so great when it puts you at the mercy of scum. You’re far better off being economically strong in functional housing than being economically weak in dream housing. In the short run, your ego will resent you, but in the long run, your wallet and pride will thank you.
I have rental property and I currently have a vacancy. This gives me a chance to assess the quality of my product before I offer it to the public. Market considerations aside, I ask myself the question: Would I want to live here? When I do upgrades I look for the best bang-for-the-buck to decide how I do so. This trades off the functional and dreamy.
I also watch bushcraft videos where someone goes into the woods then proceeds to build shelter from materials at hand. This is at one end of the spectrum and wise to keep in mind (glamping, excepted). In fact, I recently found a picture of the TENT my mother was born in back in the 1920s while Grampa was building the house I grew up in.
The other end of the spectrum does not bear contemplating. I quit going to the local Parade of Homes or the Home & Garden Show downtown because it showed me what I didn’t have. And didn’t need. Thinking on such luxuries will only stimulate “hedonic adaptation” creating dissatisfaction with what I currently have (which is good enough).
I love your term “egotrage” and applying it to my housing/lifestyle choices. I only moved out to the suburbs (from a lower class inner city neighborhood) because I feared bad effects on my kids from the neighbor kids. Now that they’re safely on their own I could easily sell my comfy house and move into one of my rentals (if I needed the cash).
steve poling recently posted…Dave Ramsey Heresy
I think it’s a shame that so many people have fallen for the “must have” features that are so prominent on HGTV and other channels. No one “needs” granite but these shows convince many that anything less is not acceptable. Our laminate still looks great after more than 25 years so why change it? It’s funny how so many of the dream items are the same things that go out of fashion before the end of their useful life and the result is more spending to update them.
Thank you, what a timely post for me.
Just visited my son and his family. They bought a small house, a few acres, and boy….is it ever a “fixer-upper”. He’s working hard on it, doing it (mostly) himself. Some stuff hired, mostly he is putting in the labor.
But…it’s “functional”. And, they can afford it.
Your article helped me “reset” my vision…I sometimes forget that it’s okay to work to get where you need to be.