What's your long-term housing plan?
Here's my long-term real estate strategy, and it's pretty simple - buy and hold. My wife Karen and I spent roughly $200,000 renovating and putting a modest addition onto our Natick fixer-upper.
We have young children just starting school, we like our town, and we have no plans to move until retirement, or, more likely, we get too old to work anymore.
Is my house underwater? Who knows, but frankly, I don't really care much either. A lot can happen in thirty years and it seems unlikely that Greater Boston is going to morph into Detroit.
If anything, maybe the bubble and now the crash will bring back the old buy and hold mentality that our grandparents had.
To me, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
The past three decades has seen the opposite happen, with the act of buying a home increasingly viewed in terms of making an investment, similar to buying a portfolio of stocks.
However, real estate speculation, especially when it involves your own home, can be extremely hazardous to your financial health.
My blog last week, on whether sellers now are just too scared to sell, sparked a pretty interesting debate on the comments board.
Homeowners worried about the declining market value of their properties should sell now and cut their losses, according to some of our housing bears.
I couldn't disagree more.
I particularly liked pamlow's comment.
When it really gets down to things, how often does a person "need" to sell or buy a home in a lifetime? Especially if there is nowhere to move to (because of a job change for example). If you scrap the silly notion of a "starter" home and buy something for the long term, then there's no reason to think you'd need to sell your house ever again, except when you're ready to move to the nursing home. If buyers start to view owning less like buying or selling a stock and more like buying a roof over their heads, then the market will fundamentally change and we'll all be happier and stop fretting about dropping home values, etc.
