@Ana Kudlack - I applaud you for your hard work! You have done so great thus far! I had a mentor who would always say "The best time to buy real estate was yesterday." Real Estate goes through cycles, but as a whole trends up. If your strategy is to buy and hold, make sure the numbers are where you want it - and then go for it! That is the nice thing about buy and hold strategy versus flipping where in flipping you are trying to time the market a little more. In Buy and hold, the sooner you buy, the sooner equity is being put into the house with each principle payment. So if you were to wait to buy a house, the house price may be lower if the market cools down, but you wouldn't have those principle payments you were making on the mortgage prior years when you bought high. If the market goes up though, then you would loose out not only on those principle payments, but also having to pay more in purchase price. It's really a matter of which of those scenarios would you regret the most based on your risk tolerance.
One of the things that helped me take and implement my action plan is that I wrote a "what if" paper, and listed out the worst case scenarios for every single what ifs I had. And after I wrote out my worst case scenario, I would have another what if, tail it. I found that the "What Ifs" and my worst case scenarios were not that bad at all. If the market crashed and I lost all my investments - then I would still be okay since I have family and friends and I could start all over. If family and friends couldn't help support me, then it would be okay because I could get a job doing XYZ and so forth. When you put worry on paper, for some reason it doesn't hold as much value in your head anymore. It is a lot quicker for someone to gain a million dollars after they had lost it than for someone who has never gained a million dollars to gain it. The first million is always the hardest. Go for it! :)
