We have already gone over this with you before. You were following the SD blogs and using our experiences as your trigger. However, you failed to take into account the fact that “the market” is not really one market but a bunch of interlinking market segments, each of which has it’s own clock.
We often allude to mid-2005 as the high point, but that only applied to the lower end in the SD region. The middle and upper end markets kept on increasing after that. That means that many of the upper end buyers and sellers who hung on after mid-2005 continued to rack up some gains, even while other people were losing their shirts. It was a risky strategy, but for some of them it paid off.
Nobody here ever said otherwise.
You should have been watching the inventory and trends in your own market segment more closely. Had you done that, you could have timed the market a little better. The flip side is that it would have involved a bit more risk on your part.
Let’s be real here. If you were a cash buyer that means two things: 1- you’re more risk averse than the average buyer; and 2 – you had that capital tied up in that property and not otherwise available to invest elsewhere. So there was an opportunity cost to being an all-cash buyer in the first place. In effect, you traded some missed opportunities for security because the security was more important to you at the time. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is something inherently wrong with trying to have it both ways. That’s why there’s no point in ruminating over what might have been.
Had you been a non-cash buyer and had you timed your market segment better you wouldn’t be talking about “losing” that rent because you would have paid at least that much for your housing whether the market was going up or down. That’s an element you haven’t accounted for in your analysis, and it significantly reduces the amount of your “loss”.
Did you really park the proceeds from your home in a checking account, or did you put it to work for you? If so, how did that work out?