My (27m) entire family lives in suburbs of Seattle along the I5 corridor, my wife's (28f) too. After a number of years of building credit and saving money for a down payment, we kept waiting for the right house to come across our eyes. We have seen 4 "perfect houses" and every time, a cash buyer comes in offering more than asking price and waiving inspections.
We really want to start a family here in the next 1-3 years and wanted to provide a "family home" for our kids, one where we don't move for their childhood so as to build some permanency. The advice my parents gave was to buy a condo or small house and then use it to buy a better house when the market is better, that way we build equity instead of pay rent.
For reference, I have a friend who bought a house we would consider perfect in 2018 for 275k, it's now 700k with relatively low effort (they built on a garage and did a a bit of landscaping in the back yard, all for less than 25k).
It generally feels like we missed the boat and are now stuck with houses that require two incomes (my income won't exceed 90k gross for about 6-8 years) or will not meet our goals that I didn't feel were too lofty to begin with. We have been heavily considering buying a large 5th wheel with our down payment money and putting it on her dad's property for a couple of years to buy time. Our expectations were really just to live close to family, afford it on one income, be big enough for two kids, and not have to move soon. We have about 40k saved up and would be first time home buyers, I make 90k a year and won't really be able to make more for another 6-8 years.
I guess the reason I am posting is to ask if we need to lower our expectations, take our parents' advice, or some other option while we wait for the market to do something else. Is there anything I'm missing that might give us hope?
Submitted April 17, 2022 at 02:45AM by maxrz https://ift.tt/SZXdUri
