I think that previously he felt capable with the money he had, but his mistake was that he did not calculate properly, many of the people who did not build finished because of the wrong way of calculating, there are so many calculations that need to be considered when building a house, this is different from buying, buying you will only calculate the mark-up figure that has been made by the developer so it is already round and only needs to be negotiated while building yourself is a lot to miss, starting from materials, workers, consumption, time frame, and small details that are sometimes not calculated so it is like unexpected costs.
Sometimes there is also a misapplication of the budget plan, for example, in 2020 building a house is only $20k, and someone then saves for it and arrives in 2026 the money has been collected, the mistake is immediately implemented without recalculating costs which is very important to do because materials and others have increased in price and cases like this cause the construction to not be completed.
I would say that as someone whose parents did built their house, I have seen how that works, and saw what happens quite often as well while growing up. My parents built their own house, and they just needed a decent capital, like back in those days it was 3-4 months worth of salary, to just buy the unfinished version, so they bought a plot of land, hired some people, and built the unfinished brick looking version.
And then every month, they spent a bit to get something done, it could be the covering of outside, it could be painting inside, it could be kitchen, it could be bathroom, it could be lights, like every month it took something. For nearly 4 years, we kept on building it, not because it took 4 years to make it liveable, it took maybe 1.5 years to do that, but then you want smaller things too, like lets put some railings on the staircases is not a thing you come up with on day one, but after a while, when all else is done, you look for small things like that.
