Two things….
Firstly, your rent is not “wasted”, nor did you receive nothing in return for it. You’d have still spent at least that amount on your housing no matter how you slice it. The big question here is how much extra would you have spent on your mortgage and what returns would you have gotten in exchange for the investment value of the equity that you had accrued prior to pulling out? Now balance those returns with how much risk tolerance you had for the entire amount of your equity. If you were up by $300,000 and you spent another $25,000 in additional mortgage payments to “earn” another $50,000 on top of that I don’t know that the risks involved would have been worth it to you. I interpret your handle (Cashman) to convey a healthy amount of conservatism with respect to your investments.
Secondly, if you pulled your Diamond Bar trigger in part as a result of following SD-centric Pigginton’s then I’m afraid you may have acted a little premature. But that’s all hindsight right now. Just as the people who didn’t pull out of the Riverside markets while they were still up have to put those decisions behind them and move forward from this point I think you should also be looking forward. And I think you are looking forward.
You did avoid losing any of your equity – you should be quite pleased with that. You are now lamenting some lost opportunity, but so what? Coulda-shoulda-woulda doesn’t count; what you keep is the only thing that really counts. You’ll live to ride the next cycle and when it comes your position will be better than ever.
