We're building a house that should be done in two months, and financially, it's a terrible decision.

When we were looking at homes to buy for our growing family, we were disappointed. We got outbid by $50k+ multiple times on houses we liked, but didn't love. We got tired of losing and decided to build exactly what we wanted. As a CPA I can tell you the math doesn't work. But sometimes the math isn't the whole story.

Here's what I mean.

The numbers are brutal. We'll spend roughly 30% more building than we would have buying. Construction loan interest, the inevitable overruns, the opportunity cost of capital tied up for a year. I've run every scenario. In pure financial terms, this is the kind of decision I'd tell a friend to think twice about. Every AI LLM tried to talk me out of it.

But we kept losing bidding wars — not by a little, by a lot. $50k, $75k over asking. Cash offers. Waived inspections. The market here has gone from reasonable to ridiculous in three years. And every house we lost had something wrong with it anyway. Wrong layout, dated kitchen, basement that smelled like 1973.

So we're building. And watching this process unfold has taught me something I should have learned a long time ago: sometimes being right about the math makes you wrong about the decision.

I've been noticing this pattern everywhere.

The math said don't leave my public accounting job to try sales in a Fortune 500 company. The math said don't leave my Fortune 500 sales job to become CEO of a medical company. The math said rent forever, and I literally wrote about that on my previous blog. The math is useful. Essential, even. But it only captures what you can measure, and it misses everything you can't.

There was a thread on r/financialindependence this week about people who hit their savings goal and then immediately move the goalposts. The math says they've reached their goal, but they never pull the trigger. This is about human nature. About managing uncertainty with numbers because that feels safer than trusting your gut.

I get that impulse. I am that impulse. But the house decision broke the pattern for me. We ran the numbers, acknowledged they were bad, and did it anyway because we'd spent two years watching what "financially optimal" home buying felt like. And it felt like losing every weekend.

The thing nobody tells you about being good with money.

When you're a CPA, people assume every financial decision you make is optimized. It's not. Being "good" with money doesn't mean every dollar goes to the highest-returning option. It means you understand and consider the pros and cons clearly enough to make a bad financial decision on purpose and accept it.

The house will cost us more and I accept that. But we'll get exactly what we want. No more losing bidding wars, no more touring places that are almost right, no more weekends refreshing Zillow like it's a slot machine. There's real value in that. Not the kind you put in a spreadsheet, but the kind that compounds in the categories spreadsheets can't track: actually wanting to come home, raising kids in a space designed for your family, and not settling.

This week's takeaway:

Find one decision you've been making purely by the numbers. Spend 5 minutes writing down what you'd do if the spreadsheet gave you permission to be illogical. Then ask yourself (or AI): what's the real cost of ignoring what you actually want? If you want to take it a step further, read The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, one of my all-time favorites.

⚡ ONE MORE THING

Jim Collins told Tim Ferriss this week that he has more energy at 68 than he did at 37. That's the kind of compounding I want to be doing in 30 years. At 37 myself, with a demanding schedule, two very active little boys and some big goals, I'm hoping to glean some advice from a conversation between two of my favorite authors.

— Matt

P.S. If you missed Issue #1 — I built a professional web page in one night with zero coding experience. The full story is here.

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