At first glance, it might look good, but your second look is more revealing. The reverse is also true. First looks might be negative images, and when you look again, it looks better. I got good advice as a youngster from an old uncle who said, "Never fall in love with anything that's for sale. If you want it too much, you'll overpay for it." I've tried to remember that, but I've still overpaid for a lot of things, among them houses and cars. And it wasn't necessarily the first look that got me. I've looked at an overpriced car a half dozen times and still ended up buying it. I did the same thing with a house, and not so much because I fell in love with the house. The price was too good to turn down, and later on you discover why. It was in a crappy town, and that means when you sell the home it's worth about what you paid for it. Maybe you look at a house and get blinded to the neighborhood. Or maybe you like the neighborhood and don't see problems with the house. The best looking car I ever owned turned out to be a lemon.
Some years ago a friend went through a divorce, and he said, "I sure didn't divorce the woman I married." And I said, "Who does?" The word here, however, is projection. We tend to project certain things onto things and people that strike our fancy, and we may or may not see the real thing or person. We know what we want, and we mistakenly project qualities onto something that looks good. Sometimes we do that no matter how many looks we take, and we end up disappointed. Hindsight is better than foresight, but we can make hindsight better if we do a better job with foresight. It's a simple as asking yourself the question, "Why do I want that, and can I afford it?"
I want a house in Mexico, and I want it badly. And yes, I'm guilty of projection when it comes to making such a move. I know how bad I want it; I just don't know if I can afford it. This is where the looks become very important . . . not just looks, but some old fashioned common sense brought about through intensive research. You can never ask enough questions, and you need to ask the right people. And then don't be too reluctant to take some good advice. I found a place in Mexico that looked good, almost too good. I studied as much about it as possible for a week, and started seeing things I didn't like. It was beautiful but too remote. It was full of American expats who were hard to live around. It was too humid. I found people online who'd been defrauded by opportunistic locals, and they were more than willing to talk about it. And, I scratched it from my list. Earlier, during the the first stages of investigation, I found a place that didn't look good. Nice enough town and on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, but the desert was bleak. Almost no rain, very little vegetation. And then I find information about the developers there, Americans who've created a nice environment for retirees. I took a second look, and then a third, and even more . . . and the more you look, the better it looks, even that butt ugly desert. It went on my list of places to visit, and that's the best look of all. See it in person, find out all you can, and do that without the intent of falling in love with it. Sometimes you find some good things, even in a desert.
And if you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find the right deal. Be wary of the great deal because it's usually not as good as it seems, and it's smart to take close looks at what seems overpriced. Larceny starts in the heart of the buyer as often as it does the seller. Somewhere in the middle there's a solution. I'd have to say that I have few regrets about the things I paid too much money for, but I have quite a few regrets about foolish money I spent on what looked like great deals. In the end I'd rather say, "Yeah, I probably paid too much, but I still got a good deal."
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