When you go shopping for a London Ontario home, there are two homes competing for your attention: the one that meets your needs, and the one that fulfills your desires.
In one of the greatest financial books ever written, ‘The Richest Man in Babylon’, George Clason writes that there are two kinds of study: the one kind being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know.
I read this book yearly to refresh and remind myself of some really simple financial basics, while very simple and maybe to easy to do, quite a few Canadians do not make wise financial decisions.
When it comes to buying a house or a condo in London Ontario, I see many people, even professionals, while well educated in their profession, buy or sell real estate without finding out what they do not know.
It is like a person complaining of a sore belly, goes to their doctor and tells the physician that Dr. Google says it is blah blah blah! The kind physician ( the one not rolling their eyes or thinking “Oh no, here we go again) will ask questions, identify the cause or the remedy and treat the problem.
In real estate the same thing, wise, intelligent people listen to what their neighbour or co-worker says, read “how to save thousands when buying real estate’, or watch all those reality shows and then become experts in buying a house or a condo.
Home sellers and their real estate representative love you, because you are the one who overpays for a home (yet brag that you got a good deal or become a complainypant) or find out that the home has structural issues or a neighbourhood stigma.
Getting back to The Richest Man in Babylon, why not let the ego settle down for a while and find out what you do not know about buying or selling a home? In real estate, we do not have a Dr. Google, but we have everyone who has ever bought or sold a home as experts on how to buy or sell a home.
If I offended anyone by being blunt with the last paragraph, hopefully, I have at least brought more awareness that perhaps you do not have all the answers and that a professional Realtor may be one of your greatest assets.
You may think money dictates your decision and in some cases, you may be right. But about 85% of the time decisions are emotional reactions to wants and not need!
