Market craziness pricing me out of new primary residence

[Katelyn S.]

I'm mostly curious to see what others would do and commiserate with anyone else in the same situation. My family and I currently own outright one SFH rental and house hack a duplex in the Pacific Northwest. We have outgrown the space in our duplex and I desperately want to purchase a reasonable SFH with acreage nearby. The dilemma has become that it will likely cost around 1 million. The SFH is worth approximately $420k, more than double what we paid in 2013. But of course, if we sold we'd have to pay capital gains. I'm kicking myself that I didn't buy back in 2019 as I'd have nearly 50% equity on some homes selling today.

What would you do? Continue to wait or jump in now?

[Account Closed]

I try to be as frugal as possible and am always looking to downsize rather that upsize. My father had always had a lot of old say sayings that made a lot of sense and one of them was, "the more you own, the more you have to maintain".  I am a plumbing contractor, went to give an estimate to install new water piping at a house where only a husband and wife lived and when I quoted my price the husband literally starting swearing at me and called me a crook. The aho..e had a 4,000 sq ft house with 5 bathrooms with 5 fixtures in almost every bathroom. The house had 2 washers and dryers and 2 water heaters. My price for an average house at the time was only about $2,000, but for this house my price was $8,000 and that was low compared to other plumbers. Then, what do you think a new roof would cost for his 4,000 sq ft house compared to the price for a 1200 to 1500 sq ft house. It will be 4 times as much. So, where is the fun and glory when a person owns more that he has to maintain and then literally suffers for the rest of his life trying to pay for all the excess.

It seems like almost everyone has dreams about owning the ranch house in the middle of a farm with a white picket fence and the strange thing about that is when you own a ranch, or even just additional acreage you take on a massive amount of work that puts the screws to your retiring. I see many people buy cars and work their butts off to make the payments. People buy new homes and work their butts off to make the payments. For myself, nothing material in this world is worth working my butt off for. My wife, two children and I live in a commercial building built in 1904. We have zero furniture with the exception of beds. We drive beat up vehicles like I have a 2000 beat up Volkswagen that looks like it came out of a junk yard, but we also have zero stress, zero bills and we enjoy not having a desire for a nice house nor material things. I work in customer's homes every day and seriously feel sorry for people with houses cluttered with tens of thousands of dollars worth material crap, expensive cars and a high percent of my customers tell me they can't pay me $69 to clean their drain until they get their paycheck. My wife always tells me she wants to try to travel around the country with zero money to see what it is like and I have more respect for that than all the people talking about the things they would like to have if or as soon as they get some hot cash in their hands.

I always believe in being frugal and keep doubling your money by saving and investing rather than spending and spending.

If you are running out of space buy bunk beds. Maybe, that is a joke!