Purchase (購入する)

It's the American Dream for many immigrants who come to the US and most people around the world: To purchase a home. A home, is, after all: where the family lives: it's the basis of one's life, where one can call home. One's life hasn't really "stabilized" if one hasn't purchased a home. 

Recently, I've been considering purchasing a home: It's not going to be a very big home, it's going to require a 30-year mortgage that feels like a set of shackles, but I still want to do it. For the past few months, though, I've been using a popular refrain that I'm sure many people who aren't sure if they want to purchase say: "Maybe later." 

I've always dreaded making big purchase items like cars, houses, secondary education. Stories of how popel got defrauded and their whole life savings are wasted come to mind; and they're usually done through middle men like car salesmen, real estate agents, and in the case of secondary education, school ambassadors who try to convince students to invest in the school (I once applied for a position like that at USC Law, they didn't take me nor should they have given what I think about law schools, but I also didn't fit the "profile" of what they were looking for). It's the reason people avoid going to malls and instead shop online like at Amazon.com: no one wants to talk to pushy salesmen or live people who are trying to convince you to buy something. I'll make up my own mind, thank you, and not submit to the inherent pressure of a purchase. 

Buying a house, incidentally, is such a big commitment to one's lifestyle: it settles where one will be living, how one commutes to work, what kind of friends one has, what road one takes most of the time, what neighborhood that person runs through (especially important for me), it's one of the biggest decisions one makes that determines one's life (other than maybe finding a spouse or deciding to have a child, maybe). Sure one can still rent out the house or sell it eventually, but in generally once one has bought, one is kind of "stuck" with it. For a nomadic, like-to-see-new-places guy like me, it's not the ideal scenario, even though the alternative of throwing money down the drain of renting places is not very appealing neither. So until the Southern California prices come down a little bit or I move to a new city because of work, the answer to purchasing a new house has to be: "Maybe later." 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan