You can do all the research in the world but there is no easy way to determine a direction in this market when you’re sitting on a house that’s losing money. The choices are very easy to define, but actually choosing one for the right reasons is a complicated and thorny procedure fraught with landmines.
1) Stay in house, refinance into a 30 yr fixed while rates still relatively low even though they have popped up a bit recently. Sit tight for 5-10 years, enter a concrete bunker and ignore all house value reports. Do some things to the townhouse, be happy, and enjoy life without worrying too much. Hopefully in 5/10 things may look perkier. Certainly won’t in the next 1-3 years.
2) Sell house ASAP as a stop gap measure for the loss in case prices continue to fall for the next x years. Rent a place for a year or two to see what the market does before committing to another place. Essentially place a bet that the market will continue to slide into filth and you’ll lose money compared to what we bought the house for in 2004 but emerge a winner in the long term by buying a bigger house later on when the prices even lower. Have to deal with short term shenanigans in a rental, small space, can’t decorate / entertain etc. Save lots of money while renting this way though.
3) Sell house next Spring after completing a few more polish projects on it over the winter and buy the single family house we’ve always wanted with some land and privacy. This would make us very happy at the cost of significant risk that a $600k house could end up as $400k in a few years yet. That kind of shit would keep me awake at night.
I think we’re leaning towards #1 or #2 even though it means putting some of our dreams on hiatus for a bit. It’s not like we’re miserable in the current place really, we’d just love to have a little bit of land and some space where we could be outside. So hard to calculate the risk properly, so the question is really, just how pessimistic are we?
P.S. A very special fuck you to the Global Economy.
