“You must live in a big house, right?” She asked me with curiosity. I was visiting South India on a volunteer trip with a group of university students. Part of the experience included staying overnight in a small village on the outskirts of the city.
The next morning, I was invited to join one of the families for breakfast in their home.
It was a small hut – a makeshift kitchen-area with a small area for a fire on the floor (no stove-top), and a combined living-bedroom space (no beds, just mats on the floor). There was no internal bathroom – they went out and squatted in the middle of the fields.
Her question caught me by surprise. At the time, I lived in a two-and-a-half bedroom apartment with my family, and it felt cramped – especially compared to friends who lived in big houses.
I suddenly felt awkward. I nodded. I guess I did live in a ‘big house’. It was a moment that showed me how much what we think we ‘need’ is driven by comparison. My ‘cramped’ apartment felt suddenly palatial.
I was reminded of this moment last week when reading an article about a family who decided to ‘deprive’ their child of a backyard and move into a “claustrophobic box” (i.e. an apartment).
We have an expectation that external upgrades will solve internal problems.
Now, this is not a “be content because others have less” article. It’s not even a “don’t chase big dreams, be happy with what you have” article. In fact, I think aspiration is good.
However, what I do often see in my work is the significant financial stress people undertake to upgrade their house expecting it will meaningfully change their lives – and often, it doesn’t.
The drive for a bigger, nicer house is understandable. It’s a heavily marketed status symbol that has become a proxy for how financially successful someone is. It’s become so normal to want a bigger, nicer home that we don’t think twice, if the opportunity to afford it presents itself.
The extra room, the kitchen renovation, the upgrade from apartment to house, new furniture – if you can afford it, it seems like a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want those things?
But what people often find is – the house upgrade doesn’t always make as meaningful an impact on their experience and quality of life, long-term, as they were expecting.
You’ve got the backyard – but now you’re just bickering with your spouse in a bigger home. You’ve got the extra room – but now your teenager just has another space to avoid you.
You’ve got the ‘dream home’ – but somehow, it didn’t come with the ‘dream life’ you thought it would. Life seems more or less the same as it did before, just in nicer surroundings.
The problem is we have an expectation that external upgrades will solve internal problems. We think of that bigger house, and we assume it’s going to come with a more luxurious life, or a happier family, or an improved social life now that you have more space to host.
But each of those things are actually separate goals – that have nothing to do with your house. They don’t come with the keys to the house, or the finished renovations. Something I work on with clients is strengthening their relationship to spending, and driving more meaningful outcomes with their spending.
One exercise that helps is: separating the physical thing you’re buying, from the emotional experience or quality-of-life upgrade you want or expecting it to deliver you. These are much harder questions – because they don’t always have easy answers.
Maybe you don’t really want a new kitchen – you want more connection at the dinner table. Maybe it’s easier to focus on a new backyard than to fix the constant cold-wars. Maybe an extra room won’t help as much as marriage counselling.
Those are far more uncomfortable questions to sit with, and harder solutions to buy for. You can upgrade your kitchen in a few months and a few thousands dollars, but creating a more harmonious family dynamic or a home full of happy memories? That isn’t so simple.
But this is the line of inquiry that is more likely to lead to spending that makes a meaningful impact on your life long-term – the kind of spending that doesn’t just change how your life looks, but how your life feels.
These are the questions that start to give you a clearer picture of what kind of life you actually want – not just what ‘things’ you want to buy, hoping they’ll come with the life you secretly want.
There is a point at which external upgrades don’t deliver as meaningful an impact on your life, as the internal ones. So, how would you spend money differently, if the goal wasn’t just a bigger, nicer house – but a happier home?
Paridhi Jain is a money and mindset coach who combines practical strategies with mindset transformation to help clients create more freedom and fulfillment in wealth, work, and life.
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Paridhi Jain is the founder of financial education platform, SkilledSmart, which has helped hundreds of adults become financially confident by teaching them practical strategies to manage, save and invest their money.
