Edited to add: I was trying to quote bearishgurl but failed miserably…. reminder to self: it’s “quote” not “reply”.

It’s a fair question. I do think that it was worth it for the following reasons:

1) if we had waited for the price of house #1 to go up (to get our equity out), house #2 would have likely gone up, too.

2) more importantly, we were worried about the interest rates going up in the next few years. that alone could have priced us out of house #2.

3) we want our kids to start school in the new neighborhood. They are 3 and 1, so school is still 2 years away.

and of course the irrational…
4) we were simply excited about the new house/neighborhood and didn’t feel like waiting several more years to move in.