So many of my clients walk into nicely renovated homes and immediately pass on them, only to walk into a fixer upper the next day and give it a hundred compliments. The dumpier home is priced 15k higher, but my clients aren’t deterred. They’ll say we could just offer less or do some work on the house. Or whatever. Either way, the dump feels like a place they could live in. When we walk into a literal turnkey that is magically less expensive and requires zero work, they say it’s too pricey. 🤔 They balk at the audacity of the seller for asking that much for that house. Or they find some other flaw. It needs a garage. It needs a finished basement. It needs to be in a better area. Etc. If the seller is going to ask this much, then they better give me something else to go with it, they say. Mind you, it’s SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER than the fixer upper. They leave me scratching my head. After experiencing enough of these scenarios, though, I’ve come up with a theory…..I think my clients feel like they don’t deserve the nice properties. 🥺
You know what, though? I’ve actually been there. In fact, I might still be there. As I’m sitting here trying to figure out my clients’ mindsets, I find myself digging a little deeper into my own. My first three homes were, by my standards today, sh*%holes. Why? Well, for one, I was in school. Broke as anything and working 40 hours a week while maintaining 15-18 credit hours, all I could afford was a sh*%hole. I also didn’t care because my house was literally just a place to rest my head for a few hours. So I got used to it. It became my normal. That was my life and it was fine. I didn’t think a nicer home was me. When I started round one of graduate school, I upgraded to a slightly nicer sh*%hole….maybe no longer able to be called a sh*%hole….a place I could totally see any college student living in. But still, it was all I could afford at the time. By the time I got my third place, I could’ve afforded something better. I didn’t want to, though.This place was a good mix of my first two. Home. When my girlfriend moved in with me and I added a teaching job to my waitressing income, my mom said to me,
“Why are you still living this way when you don’t have to?”
And at that, something clicked. You know what mom? You are right. Why am I living in this dump on top of creepy old people who stalked me in the basement during my workouts? So, my girlfriend and I immediately rented out a charming three bedroom bungalow for double the price we were currently paying. That 1000 square foot house made me feel like a baller. 😂 The beginning of upward movement. (We won’t talk about the fact that I had to slide in my mom’s basement for a few months when my girlfriend broke up with me 😂🤦🏻♀️).
So why am I giving you this little bio? Well, to understand my clients’ mindsets, I had to first figure out my own. I would have never even considered the idea that I could better my living situation if my mom hadn’t put that bug in my ear. The people I run with share a similar mentality. We know the struggle (some much much more than others) and are comfortable with the struggle.Many people’s eyes aren’t even open to the possibility of something better being seizable at this very moment. But my people who turn into my clients don’t necessarily need the push to better their living situation. Many of them hook up with me for that very reason: they want/need a better situation. So they are motivated. Motivated, and yet still stuck. Still only looking for places that feel familiar. Looking for something that just has one tiny characteristic of improvement. If a small or rundown (or both) house has been home for many years, well then those types of houses are home to them. It’s difficult to break that mindset. It’s difficult to show people that they deserve more, that they deserve more right now. Not everyone can so easily flip the switch just because their mom points out that they are living subpar.
So if this sounds like you, please know that we have all been conditioned from a very young age about the type of lifestyle we should be living and the amount of money we deserve to have. Some people feel guilty if they step it up a bit. Their mom is on the struggle bus. Their siblings are on the struggle bus. So they feel like they should be on it too. Nobody wants to look at their family and see turned up noses or hear smacking lips. Nobody wants to see hands outstretched from family members who think that because they can afford a house payment that they must have wads of extra cash just flowing freely every month. Nobody wants to hear, “Now who does she think she is?” Nobody wants to be judged. But ya know what guys….if people are jealous, then that’s on them.
They have some internal work to do to rectify that.
They should be happy for your come up, and if they aren’t, oh well. Too often, though, this guilt and undeservedness is buried deep within our subconscious. We don’t even know it’s there. We might not label it this way. We might deny it. Some of you might be reading this and have no idea what I’m talking about. And yet when we walk into a pristine house that is totally within our price range, we immediately reject it (or insert any life scenario). We start the self-sabotaging process and find all the reasons why this house is not a good idea and why the other one is better. Or we just procrastinate. We say we want a change. We go through the motions of possibly starting a change. But we never pull the trigger. We convince ourselves that we are working toward something better, but we never claim that “something” because we’ve created a million excuses as to why that “something” hasn’t manifested itself…..even if it has 100 times. These vague thoughts can be applied to so many areas of our lives, not just home buying. I could probably go on forever about this topic, but suffice it to say that you are capable of so much more than you think you are. You 1000% deserve whatever it is that you want. That nice house isn’t just for other people. It’s for you too. You have the money to pay for it; you just have to be brave enough to allocate it accordingly.