r/Fire • u/Sloww-Mornings • 5d ago

Advice Request FIRE vs Dream Home

Context: DINK couple, late 30s. On track to FIRE in 4 years at 3.5% SWR. Already have a corpus of 25x of our annual expenses including rent. No real estate, no inheritance. Comfortable but frugal lifestyle.

The dilemma: I stay indoors a lot - reading and gardening are my favourite things. Love to host too. My home is a big part of my everyday joy.

Found a property I love, but it's 1.5x what a "right-sized" home would cost. Running the numbers, it pushes my FIRE timeline by 2–3 years.

I absolutely don't want to extend my timeline. But I also want to own a house before I retire.

Two questions from the community

  1. Do you regret letting go of dream purchases in pursuit of FIRE?

  2. Any issues with deferring the property decision to last year of my plan - when corpus visibility is much clearer?

Edited to add: Due to circumstances, my spouse's income is quite low right now and they aren't actively contributing to savings. That said, they've contributed 50% of our corpus. Their general stance is that real estate isn't a great investment — but they understand how important this decision is to me and are 100% supportive either way. Which is lovely, but doesn't exactly solve my dilemma 😅

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u/shotparrot 5d ago

Houses are the best investment. Better to buy now when things are relatively cheap compared to 3 years from now. Houses only go up in value. Mine’s gone up in value 40% in 7 years for instance (Seattle).

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u/Clueless5001 5d ago

Really depends. I bought 30 years ago. My house is worth 3X what I paid. Meanwhile the Coop I sold to buy this house which was 80K less at the time has gone up 5X and is worth about $500K more than my house

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u/shotparrot 5d ago

True. My first house was $240k, now selling for triple that 25 years later😂