ᐅ Building as a Single Person – Sharing Experiences

Schimi1791 schrieb:

If you don’t have one,

you go to the bank. So the statement

Schimi1791 schrieb:

you can’t buy anything ...

is not correct.

For a small condominium apartment to start with, full financing is quite achievable and manageable even with modest credit ratings.

Schimi1791 schrieb:

Still, money is essential. So it really comes down to money. If you don’t have any, you can’t buy anything...

Money is a resource like building materials. Anyone building a house needs this resource, but in most cases, the purpose is not saving money itself, rather a contribution to a better life (whatever that means individually).
Money defines the framework for action. When this resource is limited, creative solutions are needed to reach the goal. Some are simply better at this than others. Some fail, and some abandon such a project.

nordanney schrieb:

I also bought my first condominium for personal use in my early 20s.

I would recommend the same to my son today.
Back then, I didn’t dare to take that step when I moved out. Sure, in your early 20s you might have changing partners. But if you plan to stay roughly in the same area and hold onto a property for a few years – why not? You have to live somewhere anyway, and if you can no longer pay rent, the landlord will evict you. I had too much respect for owning a condo for the wrong reasons and ended up throwing money away every month on rent for 15 years.

Evicting you from a rental apartment is almost impossible. As long as you pay a few euros in rent, it becomes very, very difficult.

nordanney schrieb:

You go to the bank. And so that’s not correct.

For a small condominium to start with, full financing is quite feasible and manageable even with modest creditworthiness.

Yaso2.0 schrieb:

Hmm, first of all, I never said you don’t need money to buy real estate, and secondly, I can tell you that I had no money when I bought the apartment; the money was borrowed from the bank.
...

Tell me, is my point really so hard to understand? 🙂

It does NOT work without money, no matter where it comes from!

Even if you don’t have money and go to the bank, you must have money to be able to pay it back. Therefore:
“If you don’t have any, you can’t buy anything...” (not even borrow money from the bank).
Furthermore, if you borrow money or can borrow it, you still have money—see the second and third paragraphs above.
Even here in the forum and in my personal experience, there have been enough examples where financing didn’t work out. In short: no money, no property!

Schimi1791 schrieb:

Still, a significant amount of money is needed for the first (and any subsequent) property.
But this isn’t really about money here...

Of course, money is involved, but owning a property without a bank loan usually doesn’t work. Rent costs money, and with cars, a lot of money generally disappears, especially here in Germany. Add to that the maintenance of cherished, expensive habits that people don’t want to give up or change.
At least, I wasn’t referring to collecting multiple properties, but rather exchanging one property for a different life path. That path doesn’t always go upward—it can go sideways or even downward just as well.

I’ve had many such conversations within my circle of acquaintances and often hear that people would like to have a situation like ich 🤨’s. But I immediately know: No, you don’t actually want that, even though you could have it!
When we then looked for concrete ways to make it happen, those options did exist—but they weren’t willing to pay what felt like a high price for it. That simple word “price” often carries a painful meaning. People want things to be different and better, but without a high “price” or the usually accompanying pain.
My nice building plot here cost less than €70 (about $75) but nobody wanted to live so far away because of the commute times; I had a daily commute of 2–3 hours my whole life, and that was already a price many were not willing to pay. We took care of our own parents and so were able to afford property together, and our then-landlady, a lovely elderly lady, had offered something similar... but who wants that? We would have done it as an alternative. Now I live very far from my children and old friends; that can also be a high price to pay. I have always had two jobs... or I ended my job at 50 and started something completely new, without any safety net, sometimes in a low-paid job abroad.
Whether that was sensible or right in retrospect, or whether it suits others, is a completely different question. But if you drop all these preset conditions, there are always opportunities — nowadays in Europe more than before.

I once had a conversation with an acquaintance, a 59-year-old civil servant who seemed completely exhausted and burned out, at the end of his rope; that’s how he appeared to me. That evening, we found many possibilities for change, and his eyes would occasionally light up again. But none of those ideas were even remotely feasible for him because he would have had to sell or rent out his large, paid-off house, permanently accept a 30% pension reduction, and so on. For that, he could have been a “free” man that very evening. The result: He just sat out his time there and still complains today... with a full and good pension, mind you, and occasionally tells me how great my life must be 🤨 and I think... oh dear... apparently, his motivation to change is not really that strong.