I heard something a couple of years ago that has stayed with me for a while now. I was discussing when I should try and enter the stock market (trying to be “smart”). The guy said, “Time in the market is a million times more important than timing the market“.
After being in real estate for over 10 yrs, what that guy said made a ton of sense. I have seen the absolute bottom of the housing market and the past few years, a booming market. I’ve heard far too many people in 2015 say, “I’m waiting for the bottom”. That bottom came and went. Or since 2017, “I’m gonna wait because the market is about to slow down”. And here we are, halfway thru 2020 and 2017 looks closer to the bottom than the top. The people who wait for prices to go down are just being left in the cold. Take the median home price in 2017, $235,000. A record at the time and a 9% jump from the year before. But those people waiting for the correction missed out as the median price today is a whopping $320,000. That’s almost $100,000 in missed equity if they would have kept waiting. I’m not going to get into the rent vs. buy equation either because it’s a pointless exercise. For 99% of people in the US, buying a home, in any market….and at anytime is a million times better than renting. It is the fastest way for anyone to build equity. Yes, we will have ups and downs. We will have those if you are renting too. Nothing changes there except you are making someone else rich by paying for their house for them. STOP IT!
Get your time in the market and stop trying to time it!