By Suzana Mikolova 
If you’ve lived in a rented home, or if you’ve lived with your parents until now, buying your first home can be an overwhelming or a great experience, depending on how you approach the entire project. There are some important issues that you need to keep in mind in order to make buying a first home a success.
The first thing you need to check is your available budget. While we’d like to have many beautiful homes, sadly we can’t afford them all. This is why going in a realistic way about it is most of the times the best ways to actually get the perfect home. For example if your budget is about $100,000, search for homes a bit below that budget to avoid overspending. Once you bought that home, there are many things that you will need to pay in addition, and unless you have some extra money set aside, you will have a tough time with your first home.
Next, you should choose your location wisely based on your family requirements. You might have kids that go to school, so finding a place near the school or at least near easy access to transportation is a must. On the other hand, you might be tired of living in the big city, so a suburban area might be more attractive to you. Usually the suburbs are cheaper than the middle of the city so you might be able to find some good deals there.
Then you need to consider what amenities you need your home to have. For example, your might want to invest in a bathtub, whereas for other people this is a secondary requirement. Or you might want to have that gorgeous fireplace that you want to use for sitting and relaxing in front of it during the nights. Or you might want to house with a basement which you can use as a laundry room.
When it comes to the space inside the house, you have to decide how many rooms you actually need. If you’ve lived in a condo or apartment, moving to a house might be what you actually need. However if you’ve lived with your parents and all you need now is to find a small place of your own where you can start your independent life, a small 2 bedroom apartment might be just the perfect way to get started.
And lastly, you might have to think about compromise. If your expectations are way too high, you might never find your dream house. So make sure that you have plenty of homes to choose from and even if the place you like most might need some repairs, if it’s cheap enough and it fulfills most of your criteria, go for it. You might just be able to turn it into the home where you will live for the rest of your life.