In the summer of 1992, my wife and I lived in Dallas. I had just turned 26 and had two years of marriage under my belt. My career was moving along, but I wasn’t making much money. And I was in grad school.

This is the point at which my wife informed me that we should have a baby. Clearly, with little or no savings, no time to spare, and not much life experience, we needed to bring another soul into the world.

Oh yeah, and before we have a child, she told me we needed to own a home. We bought our first place at the end of that year, almost eight months before our first child was born, using an FHA loan and what little savings we had.

Just three years later, I planned a career move that would take me to Tulsa, Oklahoma. We put our home on the market and began house hunting in the new town.

Our home sold in two days, and the job opportunity suddenly fell through.

I had to scramble for both a new job and a new home. That was OK, because our family now included two kids.

Six years later we had three children and my wife was itching for more space, both inside the home and out. She found a fabulous community north of town and the perfect home. For a couple of weeks we owned two residences but everything worked out.

Three years later, our business took me to Florida, where I bought another home, almost at the top of the market in 2005. I knew things were out of control, so we chose a more modest house than we otherwise would have purchased. We sold that home in 2010 then rented for a brief six months.

My wife told me that renting didn’t suit her because she couldn’t renovate. I thought that was a feature, not a bug, but I understood. We quickly purchased a home in a great area of Tampa… before moving back to Texas five years later after our last child left the nest.

That’s the story of my homeownership life. I bought homes out of want and need, which I think describes most of us.

Here’s what I didn’t do: Calculate the value of the property tax deduction; calculate the value of the mortgage interest deduction; compare those, along with other deductions, to my standard deduction based on the size of my family to determine if itemizing made sense in future years; then use that analysis to figure out if I should purchase a home and how much I could pay.

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