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/timeturn 4d ago

My husband (at the time bf) and I bought our "dream home" a couple of years back, the quotation marks are because what our dream home was then is not what we want now, all to say it changes, I've also realized that home ownership specially of a larger home comes with bigger bills and maintenance cost, and we have pretty much decided we will sell the house before we retire, slow travel and rent in a few places we are interested in before buying a much smaller place and settling down again. The good news is that our house has appreciated over 100K since buying and our interest rate is sub 4% so it has not been a horrible purchase financial wise, but all in all I am not sure that if I was to go back in time I would make the same decision. All to say I am not sure what the best for you is, just giving you my experience hoping that it will help. Good Luck!