Your First Home Should Disappoint You

When you're buying your first home, it's easy to picture the dream.

The beautiful kitchen. The pool. The perfect landscaping. The extra bedrooms. The updated bathrooms. The house that looks like it belongs on HGTV the day you get the keys.

But here's something I wish more first-time home buyers understood:

Your first home doesn't have to be your dream home. It just needs to get you in the game.

I know because that's exactly what our first home did for us.

Our First Home Was Straight Out of the '90s

The first house my wife and I bought was in Wells, Maine.

It was about 1,500 square feet, on a circle in a great neighborhood.

And the house itself?

Let's just say nobody was walking in and saying, "WOW, don't change a thing."

It was a fixer-upper straight out of the '90s. Nothing had been updated. It was plain. It was kind of ugly. There wasn't much landscaping.

It wasn't the house we dreamed about owning someday.

But we could see what it could become.

So we bought it.

And then we got to work.

We Didn't Have a Huge Renovation Budget. We Had Ourselves.

We painted.

We bought all new appliances.

We redid a bathroom.

We replaced lighting.

We installed tile floors in the kitchen.

We redid the living room floors.

We landscaped.

And we did as much of it ourselves as we could.

That little house taught us A LOT.

We learned how to fix things. We learned how much work goes into maintaining a home. We learned what improvements were worth spending money on. We learned what we could do ourselves.

Most importantly, somewhere along the way, that plain little fixer-upper became our home.

And we loved living there.

That's something I think first-time buyers sometimes miss when they're scrolling through perfectly staged houses online.

You don't have to love every part of a house on closing day.

Sometimes you grow into it.

Sometimes you make it yours.

Sometimes the ugly house becomes the one you still talk about years later.

Then the Navy Sent Us to Florida

After a few years, the Navy moved us to Florida.

We weren't ready to say goodbye, so we kept the house and turned it into a rental.

For the next few years, someone else lived in our first home while we continued our lives hundreds of miles away.

And part of us always thought maybe life would eventually take us back there.

Then COVID happened.

The Maine real estate market took off, and suddenly we were faced with a decision we hadn't expected to make.

Do we keep the house we love—or take advantage of a market we may never see again?

We decided to list it.

Within days, we had an offer for well over our asking price.

We couldn't believe it.

And as exciting as that was financially, selling that house was hard.

This wasn't just a property on a spreadsheet.

It was our first house.

We had always hoped maybe we'd end up back there someday.

But sometimes building wealth means making an emotional decision with your head instead of your heart.

So we sold it.

That Little Fixer-Upper Had a Bigger Purpose

Looking back now, I understand what that house really gave us.

Equity.

The little 1,500-square-foot fixer-upper that wasn't our dream house helped us afford the next house.

And then real estate helped us again.

And again.

Over time, we were able to use the equity we built to keep leveling up as our family, needs and life changed.

Today, we're in a larger home with more space for our family, and we've kept another home we loved as a rental.

And when I trace backward how we were able to get here, that story doesn't begin with our current house.

It begins with that little house on Berube Circle.

Without the equity we started building in our first home, we wouldn't have had the same ability to put money down on the homes that came afterward.

That's why I tell first-time buyers:

Stop Expecting Your First Home to Be Your Forever Home

Your first house may not have the pool.

It might have an ugly bathroom.

The kitchen might be 20 years out of date.

You might spend your weekends learning things from YouTube that you never expected to know how to do.

That's okay.

Your first house isn't supposed to be the reward. It can be the thing that helps you GET to the reward.

Homeownership isn't guaranteed to produce a profit—markets can go down, repairs cost money, and every buyer's financial situation is different.

But don't let an unrealistic picture of the perfect first home keep you from considering a perfectly good first step.

Here's to Berube Circle 

We've owned other houses since then, but there's only one first house.

We still talk about Berube Circle.

The equity we'd built helped open the door to the next chapter of our lives.

That house had a purpose.

It got us in the game.

And sometimes that's exactly what a first home is supposed to do.

-Travis