I went out to dinner with my grandparents this week. Today, they live in a six bedroom house (it seems huge, but it’s just enough to bed down all the aunts, uncles and cousins when everyone comes to town). But they started out, about two miles down the road and fifty-five years earlier in a house with four rooms total. It was tiny, built out of flimsy materials and they put everything they had towards paying it off. Within just a few years, they’d paid off the house, sold it and used that equity to buy something a little bit better. And they did that over and over again, eventually winding up in their dream house.

Even I am guilty of wanting to start at the top. I’d love to find a house that will hold the family I plan to build, rather than just me and my significant other. I’d love to build a house with little nooks and crannies that will be perfect for our hobbies and get a place with enough land to grow my ideal garden. But, even if we could get the requisite mortgage for such a lovely spread, we couldn’t afford it and we know it.

Instead, we’re starting small. Today, we don’t need rooms for kids or space for a big garden. We want to go a bit better than my grandparents’ original four rooms — I need a fifth room for a home office. But we’re following the new trend of smaller homes: we don’t need extra rooms, or to pay for them.

So think long and hard about what you need now and what you’ll need in your immediate future. In the next five years, do you really need to plan for separate rooms for your planned three children, especially if you aren’t planning to have them for another three years? Or can you count on the fact that, assuming nature conforms to your schedule, your children won’t quite require rooms of their own yet?

There is a lot to be said about planning for the long-term, for picking a home that you will spend the rest of your life in. But the fact is that, today, the average family spends perhaps four years in a house before moving. So plan for those next four years when selecting a new home rather than the next twenty. While you might not get into your perfect home quite as quickly as you would like, you will be able to find something a little kinder to your budget.