What I've done right - Part 1

• Buying a small house.

Our house squeeks in at just under 800 square feet. It listed as 750 on one of our documents. This is a basic, 1950s built home - a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Since there are only two of us, anything bigger would seem wastefull. If one of us wants to be alone, we go in another room - very simple. It therefore follows that it's cheap to heat - we've only been here half a winter, but it was approximately $65 a month to heat when we first moved in and couldn't figure out how to work the thermostat. The heater ran constantly. Now that we have it figured out, I hope this winter will be lower.

We also pay less in homeowner's insurance because there's fewer bells and whistles. For example, not having a fireplace saved us quite a bit of money. Taxes are also relatively low, but that's also partly due to the county we live in.

We have a different attitude towards "stuff" now. The Mister, for example, has a massive CD collection, and looked into getting a special cabinet to hold them. It would have cost about $200, and we couldn't figure out where it would go. So we put it off. I might research it for Christmas or his birthday, but it's not a priority. He's been stashing his CDs in odd places for years now, and it's worked fine. We looked at townhouses over double the size of our current home. The other day I mentioned one we looked at, and we both said "What would we have done with all that space?" We would have bought more stuff, that's what.

If we lived in a rural area, we might have bought a larger place because the necessities of living are different in the country. But suburban living doesn't have a lot of demands for wood shops and barns and spare bedrooms.

Whatever mistakes we made or will make, I won't regret purchasing our house. Some might feel cramped, but we don't want them to stay anyway.