Getting to know you - do you have kids, etc.

[arewethereyet]

When my son went to work at Pepsi, about 14-15 years ago, it was really his first 'real' job.  Husband had already worked there for years so I was familiar with the benefits and helped son set his up.  I set up for contributions to a 401K as Pepsi matches up to a certain percentage and snuck in for his part to increase every year on his anniversary up to the maximum allowed.  A few years down the road he asked husband why when he got a raise he never got any more money on his check.  I had to come clean about the increase I had set on the 401K.  He had been working for about nine years when he bought his house and was able to 'borrow' the money for the downpayment and other expenses from himself because he had a pretty sweet nest egg built up.  

Since then the home values in our town have skyrocketed.  Our house is worth twice what it was when we bought it 2006 and son's house has increased in value by about a third.

Real estate tends to be like that. When my maternal grandfather was mustered out of the army at the end of WW2, he purchased two homes on five acres of land for £5000 and had to borrow the £500 deposit from his parents. Fifty years later, the property sold for just over a million.

Boru

When we moved here in '06 there was a new home being completed every eight hours in the county. That went on for a while and then businesses had to start moving in to accomodate all the new people. Things leveled off then slowed way down due to COVID. Now single family housing is at a premium here because that building boom stopped. Now we are getting apartment complexes instead.

A lot of people used to think our town was too far out to commute into Dallas and the 'burbs but with more working from home that's not the concern it used to be. And believe me, the commute really sucked.