Home Sweet Home: My Journey Through Five Properties

Home Sweet Home: My Journey Through Five Properties

What’s my perfect home sweet home?

Since my very first home sweet home (means a place I buy to stay), my first requirement is price. I would not want to sacrifice everything just to afford a home and then always eating the same food at the cheapest stall I could find or always staying home and watch TV / browsing the internet as my holiday. That’s not the life I want even if I want to buy a home sweet home because I know very well that rental paid is 100 percent a loss while mortgage paid is principal payment gained.

Second requirement is size, design and convenience. I am fine with the location as it has never needed to be in those popular areas. As long as it met my requirements in duration (not distance), I do not care what people tell me about the location I bought. Just need to remember that for all these properties which were ‘not’ in those locations people think highly of, when I sold those properties, everyone would then realize they missed a good opportunity.

So, did I manage to buy my perfect home sweet home? Yes I did, 5 of them even. haha. Read on to know.

My 1st Home Sweet Home

1st home sweet home was an apartment of 730 sq ft with a very small gym room and a big swimming pool. I was very happy with this for many years. This property was a mere 10 minutes from my office even with traffic jam. So, without jams meant I arrive within less than 10 minutes. My wife’s office was 30 minutes away with jam. In fact this property was a mere 5 mins walk away from our rented apartment. So, moving was breeze too.

Then, when my wife and I earned a higher salary after a few years later and we wanted a bigger home just in case we have a baby, we decided to buy a bigger and more luxurious place. So, from an apartment, we moved up to a condo; a bigger sized and better equipped facilities too.

My 2nd Home Sweet Home

2nd home sweet home was a condominium of 1,258 sq ft with a better gym room and a Balinese-styled swimming pool. It even has a small secondary forest (which I have ventured into once). I love this second home sweet home and I stayed there for 8 years. When this property was being built, I could see it from the balcony of my 1st home sweet home. So, I watched as the developer built my new home.

I enjoyed this 2nd home sweet home thoroughly and I would have continued to stay there but then I decided to move to Kuala Lumpur and take up a regional role instead. You see, when it comes to Penang, unless one is in the engineering field, opportunities would be limited for everything else. HQs of MNCs are usually in KL.

My 3rd Home Sweet Home

I started work on Monday and I moved to KL just on Sunday. Amazing, right? Well, my 3rd home sweet home was a condominium I bought some years back and when I decided to move to Kuala Lumpur, I decided to stay there. It was 1,053 sq ft condominium with even two squash courts and a big swimming pool. I do not remember if it had a gym. I played squash many times and this was one happy place for me until my wife and my baby moved to KL from Penang with me.

As we needed a bigger space since there’s always a chance for our second baby, we decided to move earlier prior to the baby. Among the many choices included landed properties but none of the landed properties got enough of my interest. Many were FREEHOLD too (which is how developers love to shout) but that’s not a main consideration for me.

My 4th Home Sweet Home

4th home sweet home was a Balinese-styled condominium. By the way, anything Balinese-styled could be an older condominium. There was a time when Balinese style was super popular and every developer was doing it. Nowadays, it’s more likely to be a modern-contemporary or minimalist-elegant kind of style instead. This condominium was 1,743 sq ft. So this was a very nice home and it has a huge gym, tennis court, basketball court, sauna, super big Balinese-inspired pool with jacuzzi pools and more.

Total units were 700 plus but let me tell you that I am able to drive around the whole condominium ground. Therefore this is by far better than some low-density condominium but you can only make a small u-turn as the condo total land space is very little. Understand what you buy because low or high density must be coupled with comfort and size too. I stayed here for 10 years plus. We decided to move as I wanted to buy my first landed property.

My 5th Home Sweet Home

5th home sweet home is a strata-landed property. Yes, strata-landed meant it’s leasehold too. It has a 50-acre park with 5 lakes and a club house with 8 badminton courts, super huge swimming pool, well equipped gym and many more. Plus this is a master-planned township (really established developer) which meant that it will keep getting better with a lot more conveniences etc with every passing year. Please remember that when it comes to township, the developer criteria becomes critical.

This newest home sweet home wise has no less than 30 plus F&B places including pharmacies, Mr. DIY, supermarkets and more. I personally think by end of next year, the F&B places could have easily reached 100 if not more. How long will I be staying here? At this moment, I am thinking maybe at least until the time when my children are all in the university lah. That’s roughly another 7-8 years more. What property would be my 6th home sweet home?

My 6th Home Sweet Home

This should be a cheaper and smaller property, maybe further away from the city centre since my wife’s not working and I would probably be very flexible by this time in terms of working life. Too far away to decide now but there will definitely be this 6th home sweet home because I definitely intend to sell my 5th home sweet home and gain from it financially in the future.

When it comes to home sweet home, nothing is perfect

Nothing is perfect which meant that waiting for that perfect home at the perfect location coupled with perfect price and perfect design and everything else being perfect including the perfect home loan (100%), the perfect interest rate (super low) and even the perfect renovation (comprehensive and yet super cheap) will not be happening in this imperfect world we live in. My example above tells you that the home sweet home we will buy will be perfect for us at one particular time after taking into consideration our earnings and over the years, as we sold the earlier property for a good surplus, we could then buy the next ‘better’ property too.

All the best in deciding and feel free to subscribe so that you will also know all other property investment of someone who has properties in 6 cities / towns in Malaysia too aka me.

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