I hope my story will help you understand. My wife and I have been on the sidelines renting too. At first it was very tough, as my wife, like you, desperately wanted a house. But the housing market was peaking and I wouldn’t agree to buying anything.
Now, looking back, both my wife and I are glad that we didn’t buy. If we had bought when we first started looking we would have paid way more than the house would be worth today. In real terms this means we would have lost a good bit of money. As a bonus, I can tell you that in the last year we’ve been able to significantly up the quality of houses that we are looking at, because prices have come down, but our budget has not.
But to me the more important question is what would have buying a house at the peak done to our marriage? While everyone says that money is not important, love is what matters, I think it’s also important to acknowledge that money can be a huge source of stress in a marriage. While I try my best to be fair, and not hold grudges, or be angry, I’m sure if we had lost a ton of money over the last year due to my wife’s insistence that we buy, that would have put a good bit of friction in our marriage. And then, to boot, my wife would have felt that anything I said about it was an I told you so.
Instead, as my wife hears of coworkers going into foreclosure, friends struggling with mortgages they can’t pay, and their marriages turning rocky, she realizes that the fear of not buying a house was not well founded.
Likewise, I suggest that you shouldn’t fear that your husband will never agree to buy a house, but instead focus on the fear that forcing a bad decision could impact your marriage in many negative ways.
As it is now, my wife and I are closer than ever, happily pursuing the interests in our life, saving our money, and renting as we watch things from the sidelines. Would we love to stop renting and buy? Of course! But worse would be to jump into something that would turn out poorly. That’s the fear that should be keeping you awake at night.
