You aren’t chained to your house….yet.
The only people who can’t move right now are those people who are already in the red. If you are still in the black, sell and rent in your neighborhood. You still shop in the same places, hang out with the same friends and your kids still go to the same school.
The only difference is that you have potentially paid yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent for a few years. How many hours would you have to work to make that much? How many hours will you spend on a move? I’m going to be generous with numbers.
40 hours to sell your house
10 hours to find a rental
80 hours to move and set up a new place
Assuming your house is worth 800k and it goes down 20% (a conservative number, I think), you have paid yourself $120,000 (realized after realtors fees).
That means you have earned $923.00 an hour for your trouble. Whow! What a great job.
If your house goes down 40%, you have paid yourself $2,769 an HOUR.
Plus, your monthly expenses are going to be much lower than your mortgage because rents are so out of whack with values.
I live a house right now that is worth 3 times the one I sold. The garage door just broke, a gate needed to be fixed and the stove top is being replaced. I paid nothing to fix these problems. Someone else had that burden.
