Same. I've been very lucky in my home purchases. I bought one at the bottom of the market, in a very desirable area, and at the time, people told me I was crazy. And it's not like I just had the balls to do it, I just had to have a place to live. I basically just got lucky. I only wish I had kept that particular house, because while I made money on it, I could have made a lot more today.
But there again, after I moved, I would not have been able to afford a house where I moved, had I still been hamstrung with the mortgage. After I did the math, it really didn't make much difference.
I just want to pay the dang thing off, and let the equity do what it will do.
I always use the analogy of housing being a carousel that never stops. It slows down and speeds up, but never stops. Once you are on its easy and safe to go from horse to horse.
Buying your first home is painful. Coming up with the down payment, committing to a neighborhood, etc. But after a few years of paying down principal and hopefully a little appreciation, you can move to another house much easier than buying that first one.
To
@WrightGuy821 :
I am few years older than
@OG Goat Holder but we likely started our civilian careers around the same time... Right when the great recession started. I walked away from $2500 on that house (in January of 07') not because I knew the market would tank over the next several years, but because I was losing my job. Lots of people ended up losing their jobs. Even more took big àss paycuts of 10-30%. Pensions were cut. It was horrible. There was no PPP, no extra unemployment, and the closest thing we got to stimulus was a $300 advance on our 2008 income tax refund, which was clawed back 7 months later. We didn't buy houses because we were too scared of losing our jobs and the banks wouldn't write Scrooge McDuck a mortgage if he did want to buy a house.
It sucked, but we were rewarded 4-5 years later with some excellent home buying opportunities.
While I empathize with how expensive housing is now, you have another opportunity that you should focus on... Your career. This will probably go down is one of the single greatest career advancement time periods in modern history. The "boomer" that younger millennials and gen z bag on so much, just retired en masse. They were our bosses 15 years ago and laid us all off to save their own jobs. So yes housing sucks, but spend this time working on your career, debt, savings, personal life, etc. Focus on this stuff and the housing market will come back to you since you are skating to where the puck is going to be as the say.
