asianautica brings up a good point about the .com crash in 2001. I was a new investor, and I remember myself agreeing with the propaganda fed to me at the time, things like, “The stock market is not really a bubble,” and “the current situation is not like the past where fundamentals were important.” There were too many of these “expert” opinions to list, and most of them were wrong.
Anyway, the point is, I learned from this experience. Over the last few years, we have heard much of the EXACT same kind of “expert” propaganda being fed to us about the housing market. Granted, in some ways real estate is different from stocks, but in many ways it is the same. Every day I see similarities to the stock market crash in 2001. The lessons I learned from that time tell me that I should wait awhile longer as the housing market WILL go through a down cycle. Nothing can stop it at this point.
By the way, FYI about my stocks back in 2001. I ended up keeping every stock I had bought around 1998. They reached incredibly high levels and I did not sell. They then crashed miserably after 2001 of course, I still did not sell. By 2005, they had recovered nicely, and I finally sold half to pay off my student loans. This was a VERY good lesson in market cycles.
