“We’ll just move again in a few years” is one of the most common sentences I hear from engaged and newly married couples touring their first home together. It sounds responsible — don’t overextend, keep the payment manageable, get your feet under you first. I get the instinct. I just don’t think most people who say it have actually run the math on what “a few years” really costs.
The plan sounds smart. That's the problem.
Buying smaller on purpose isn’t a bad instinct — it’s a reasonable one dressed up as a plan with no timeline attached. “A few years” almost never means three. It usually means whenever life forces the next move: a baby, a job change, a parent who needs help nearby, or just quietly running out of patience for a house that never really fit. By the time couples call me about moving up, they’ve usually been thinking about it for a year or two before they said it out loud to each other.
What actually happens after you move in
The first year is fine. You’re newlyweds or newly engaged, the house is new to you, and small feels cozy instead of cramped. Then the second bedroom becomes a home office, or storage, or both. Then a baby is on the way and it becomes a nursery, and the home office moves to a corner of the living room. None of this is a crisis. It’s just friction — the quiet, ongoing cost of living somewhere that fit the plan you had two years ago instead of the one you actually have now.
The real cost of "we'll just move again"
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud enough: moving again isn’t free. You’re paying closing costs twice — once to buy, once to sell — plus commission on the sale, plus the moving costs themselves, plus whatever the rate environment has done to you in between. On a $320,000 starter home, it’s not unusual for the combined cost of buying it and then selling it three years later to run well into five figures. That’s money that could have gone toward buying the right-sized home the first time, instead of paying twice to arrive at the same conclusion.
The starter home isn’t the problem. Buying it without a plan for what comes after is.
What I tell engaged and newly married clients
I ask people to picture year five, not just year one. Not a guess, not a worst case — just an honest, reasonably confident picture of where you’ll likely be: kids or no kids, remote work or an office commute, staying in Hamilton County or not. Then we buy for that picture, within reason, instead of buying for the smallest number a lender will approve. It doesn’t mean overbuying or stretching past what’s comfortable. It means making the size and layout decision on purpose, with a timeline attached, instead of by default.
The Bottom Line
You don’t have to buy your forever home the first time out. But you should buy on purpose — with an honest look at where you’ll likely be in five years, not just what fits today. That one conversation, had before you tour a single house, is usually worth more than any square footage debate.