Thanks for the comments. When I buy, it’ll be all cash, so I have no mortgage calculation. I may just leave out the opportunity cost too, because that applies only if I assume the home won’t appreciate at inflation or the rate of other assets. I simply won’t be able to bring myself to buy if house prices are still moving down at a clip. So my assumption at purchase will be that the condo/house asset I’m purchasing could appreciate or depreciate just like stocks or anything else I could buy. I could be wrong, but then I could be wrong if I buy stocks too. Simple calcs, but it makes it easy to decide.
I went through the boom of 1987-1990, and the drop of 1991-1996. I moved from LA to OC in 1996 and didn’t buy because I was very familiar with what houses here cost in the 1970’s. (I was a RE nut even when I was a teenager in the 1970’s, so I knew prices in So Calif even though I lived 5000 miles away.) That experience taught me to not be greedy and not to use absolute historical price measures, and instead to just buy when I can lock in my current living situation at around my current cash cost….. unless prices are dropping so fast that I am convinced the market is still going down. I never again want to read in my rental about prices that are too high for me and going even higher.
