I appreciate the engagement and response.
A lot to quote back but my view the real estate property in Portland skyrocketing way above the 3-5% and above stocks is that luck component I was talking about. Plenty of popular cities grow fast until they don’t. If it was certain Portland would grow, everyone would buy property there. I’m glad it worked out for you; right now we’re looking at hindsight.
Of course we are.
That's all we can do is look back at any/all investments over the same period and see what happened.
The simple fact is it was (in that time period) not only a better investment, but it also gave us the very real and very needed opportunity to impact the growth (and offset setbacks) in real time, which the stock market simply wouldn't have done/didn't do.
Did a good market help, of course it did (that's why we continued to invest in it).
But we also worked our asses off for what we have. We renovated homes after work hours while we had jobs.
After returning from our trip we completely redesigned our life and our properties in a couple months... we converted single families to duplexes almost doubled gains.
No way that was happening with luck alone, or on a standard "wait and see" plan.
Major repairs can happen - theft of AC coil, pipe leak, water heater breaking, hail damage, roof replacement, vacancy, boat through-hull failure. I agree probability is low but
In case you think we aren't profoundly aware of repair costs-
Just like everyone else making any investments, we had our bad investments/losses. We've had our repair costs and problems, weve had our bad tenants....
Also why i'm such a proponent for hiring a management company despite the fees - if youre in this for the long game you have to take the stress out of the equation and make it a line item like any other expense.
I mentioned earlier a "bad investment" out of state... no way to describe exactly how bad that was.
To keep it short (though looking back its an almost funny story)... We moved in our first night after driving half way across the country towing all our remaining belongings and had to kick out vagrants from midnight to 3am.
We learned the next day that we had bought the (still very active) drug and prostitute house in town. Awesome!
Probably my fault, I did tell our realtor we wanted an "up and coming neighborhood"
In addition to finding out that we had to essentially rehab the entire neighborhood image, chase cons away in the middle of the night 3-4 nights a week as they got out of the state pen and came directly to us for drugs, convince prostitutes that our bay window was no longer a drive up "pay-the-pimp" window. Every wire, pipe, fixture and appliance in the place had to be replaced because it wasn't prepped the winter before.
10 years later we barely broke even (and that's if you DON'T count the blood sweat and tears or a solid year of our lives).
Even in Portland, we've also had hoarders, we've had people withhold rent for months on end, we've had failing foundations, broken beams in a basement, we've had water damage, mold and infestations....
Again, I've never once attempted to paint this as a "golden egg" or a walk in the park.
many people in the financial planning space are conservative and would feel uncomfortable without a plan for that. In fact many sailing forums are similarly conservative on how much money you should have set aside for repairs vs cost of boat. (Many suggest cash reserves almost equal to boat cost).
This is part of why Ive found so much of this thread humorous...
I would have always considered us/described us as extremely conservative as well!
We bought smart in a market where people were buying vacation homes and jetskis, and instead of taking hard money, credit card debt and balloon mortgages, we did tons of research research to buy only in the best neighborhoods already starving for rental stock, took good rates/terms and never - ever overextended ourselves.
I don't know what's more conservative than moving into a van to reduce your overhead. We didn't even own dryer sheets for crying out loud.
Im not saying that the path we followed didn't have good, bad and ugly... im just saying that anyone who's committed to this with enough fire, passion and willingness can actually control their own future... and for many who are sitting at a job they hate looking at 3 more decades fo work - that might just be a decent and/or acceptable option.
Why would I suggest that after all the experiences listed above??
Because if the goal (which ours was) is to find FI and to RE as fast as possible...
I think we all know that it is
all but impossible for us to be sitting where we are today if we had only employed the standard plan of a 401k match and a decent run at the markets.
The fact that we chose real estate allowed us to be active participants, and after we travelled and realized we had a desire to make this move permanent - no other path i'm aware of could have allowed us to move our plans into even higher gear in such a short amount of time (and on very limited funds) and literally move us from losing money every month to passive income flow, much less being able to chase a lifelong dream at the same time.
Sorry... for what somehow turned into a very long response
Never let it be said again that i'm not answering questions to help unpeel the onion.
