Decision Making Process Paper Week One

Decision Making Process Paper Week One MGT 230 Decision making is part of a person’s every day daily routine. We all wake up and have to decide what we are going to wear for the day. Some of us may even decide not to get ready at all. The magnitude of peoples’ decisions is dependent on many factors. It is important to thoroughly analyze a situation before making decisions. My family and I had lived in Newport News, Virginia for about three years. My wife and I had rented our homes ever since we got married.
In 2009, I finally received military orders to be stationed back home in beautiful Coronado, California in San Diego County. We had a common obstacle, where in San Diego did we want to live and did we really want to rent? “There’s no question that buying a house makes sense for some folks, but mainly for non-financial reasons. Owning a home gives you stability (you’re not at the mercy of a landlord) and freedom (you can do what you want with the place). But financially, it’s not always the best bet. ” (Roth [insert & “comma” and “Snell”] 2012) We had to figure out if owning was for us.
First we went through all of our finances and determined how much dispensable income we had. Fortunately, we didn’t have much debt which gave us a pretty large positive margin between our income and our debts. We then determined how much we would likely spend on variable expenses such as gasoline, entertainment, utilities, etc. Once we determined how much we could afford to pay for rent or a mortgage, we immediately wrote a list of all the cities we wanted to live in San Diego according to school districts and safety for our children.

Next we did rental searches and price searches for home in the cities we wanted to live in to get an idea of how much we would be paying for rent or a mortgage and if it was within our allowable spending limit. “The third stage of decision making involves determining the value or adequacy of the alternatives that were generated. In other words, which solution will be the best? ” (Bateman, [insert “&” before comma”] Snell 2011) From this point, we had to determine which solution would work best for us.
This narrowed down our search to two cities, and we realized that renting a home would cost just as much as owning a house that we would be happy with. We contacted a realtor that was recommended by my parents and began our search for a new house. During the time of our house search, there was a tax stimulus that we wanted to take advantage of for first time home buyers, but there was only a couple of months left in the program and I only had two weeks to look at houses and have an accepted offer.
Also, if we didn’t choose a house before I left, we would have lost our opportunity to take advantage of the tax credit that was available to first time home buyers. We felt very rushed, looked at a handful of houses and quickly put an offer in for the best one we saw due to time restraints. I flew back to Virginia from leave and found out our offer was accepted. We closed escrow in a month and my family moved into our new house. It was an exciting time in our lives. Chapter three’s Managerial Decision Making similarly resembles our decision making process when we decided to buy our first home with the exception of a couple steps.
We didn’t quite discover a problem as stated for a first step in the decision making process, but we did determine that buying a home would be a better overall decision for us. The book’s second and third steps were similar to ours because we did generate another solution which was to rent, and we did evaluate each solution carefully by considering our finances and our desired living locations. In correlation to the books fourth step, we mistakenly ended up satisficing [insert “&” before comma”] and chose the first house that met our needs and achieved our goal.
We implemented our decision by putting an offer in and buying the house. After the entire process, we have many regrets and have determined what we will do next time we purchase a house. The next time around, I would want to implement the step of “making a choice” a lot better. Instead of satisficing [check spelling] I would want to maximize our choice by taking our time and finding a handful of houses that suit our needs before deciding on purchasing again. Especially in this time where foreclosures and short sales are a dime a dozen, there are many properties to take advantage from.
Decision making is very important in our daily lives and even minute decisions can change our future drastically. It is very important to carefully assess and make decisions. References Bateman, T. , Snell, S. (2011). Management: Leading & Collaborating in a Competitive World (9th Ed. ). (pp. 91-92). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Roth, J. (2012, December 03). Is it better to rent or to buy? Time Business & Money. Retrieved March 30, 2013, from http://business. time. com/2012/12/03/is-it-better-to-rent-or-to-buy/