<prompt> Human: Im looking for experiences and advice. My wife and I are buying a home in the next six months. Were wondering whether we should buy a starter home now and our dream home later, or if we should buy a middle ground home now and settle. For reference, a starter home for us would be in the 100k to 150k range. It would likely be a duplex, but could be single family. We could afford this now with a hefty down payment. The goal would be to have enough saved for our dream home 300k to 400k and not in the cards right now in 5-10 years and retain the starter home as an income property.The other option is to buy a middle ground home now in the 200k to 250k range. We could swing this at our current income, and it wouldnt be totally uncomfortable, but it certainly wouldnt be the easy street that the starter home and associated revenue listed above would be. This home also would not provide any income stream and would be approximately 2-3x the amount in property taxes. The advantage would be that the schools would be adequate for our daughter due this June, and it could be a longer term option if it needed to be. The downside is that it would be, to a certain extent, settling in terms of our life goals, not structurally. So what have you donewould you do? Would you go for the easily affordable starter home with poor schools that you have to be out of inside of 10 years, but could allow you to be in your dream home this decade? Or would you go for the middle ground home that could be longer term if needed, but would provide no long term revenue and would eat enough of your future income that the dream home wouldnt be possible for a long time?  <response>: As a lot of the other advice in this thread is saying, I would echo the sentiment of only buying a house that you love. Keep in mind things happen in life and although you have a 5-10 year plan of moving into your dream home, would you be happy in the 100-150k duplex for an extended period of time beyond 5-10 years? If the answer is no, then dont do it. Wife and I went starter home route and everything turned out okay in the end as of now, but if we could do it over again we wouldve waited, continued renting, and skipped starter home route and went with a more permanent home of the sort that were in now. Ended up just costing a lot of time and money we wouldnt have had to spend if we skipped starter home step. We had these grand visions of fixing up the house, becoming good at home improvement, and then eventually keeping it and renting it out. We quickly found out we have neither the time nor patience to learn the skills needed to fix up a house as we both work a lot and would prefer to focus on what were good at. Being landlords didnt appeal to us in the end as well and a property management company takes too big a bite out of the bottom line so we sold starter home. I will say we got good at basic stuff as far as home maintenance is concerned, but youll get that with owning and living in any home long enough. 