This Is the Biggest Thing I Regret About Buying My Current House

Almost two years ago, my husband and I bought a home. We intended for the property to be a temporary house for us to stay in for a few years while we decided whether to get a mortgage to build or buy a more permanent place.

But, after just over a year, we’ve decided we can’t stay here any longer and must sell and buy a new house as soon as possible. That’s because we made a decision I really regretted when purchasing the place.

Our big mistake when we bought our current home

The biggest mistake that we made when we made our home purchase was that we looked at how far we were from the locations that we wanted to go to — but we did not look in-depth into how long it would actually take to get there.

The result of this was that while we were around eight to 15 miles from places we go often, it ended up taking us 45 minutes (or sometimes more) to get to these locations. And, unlike other places where we have lived where there was traffic only at certain times, like during rush hour, we end up hitting this terrible traffic pretty much every single time we want to go anywhere no matter the time of day.

Since this home is a vacation house, we really wanted to be able to go out and enjoy doing things while we were living in it. But the traffic became such a nightmare that we were reluctant to even go out — and when we did, even if we had a fun time, we had to deal with a miserable commute home that ended the day on a bad note.

We decided that it wasn’t worth living with the stress, so we’re selling our home after less than two years. While we know this isn’t great for our personal finances, we really regret not paying attention to this issue and we want to undo our mistake ASAP.

Be sure to consider all the details about how your house will affect your life

Before purchasing this property, I thought I was a seasoned home buyer who knew what to look for. And I feel like I tried to do the right things by checking how far away the house was from our common destinations.

But, the reality is, if you aren’t familiar with an area, you can’t know what living there will be like unless you really focus on the day-to-day details that will affect your life — like the traffic, level of noise, and interactions with neighbors. We should have visited the area more and driven during high traffic times to our preferred destinations so we could have seen just how bad things were. We’ll be doing that for all future homes.

Ultimately, while this was an annoying lesson to learn, the experience reaffirmed how important it is to do your due diligence before buying a home so you don’t end up with regrets.

This article was written by Christy Bieber from The Motley Fool and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive Content Marketplace. Please direct all licensing questions to [email protected].