How to Avoid Making Huge Mistakes with Life’s Big Decisions

The Mistake

A condemned three-story house in DetroitWhen my wife and I had been married for a year, we made a decision to purchase an apartment. It remains, to date, the worst decision we’ve ever made.

To start off with, we probably shouldn’t have purchased anything at all. But there was pressure from parents, the peer pressure of our friends doing the same thing, and the constant fear in Sydney-siders of “getting left behind the market”. Looking back now, I see the bigger factors that we’d been married for one year, we were both very early in our careers, we had very little savings relative to our incomes, and we were living in a friend’s place for low rent. There weren’t really any good reasons to buy.

The big mistake, though, was the place we bought. Continue reading