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Comment by sleazebreeze | Hacker News Reader

Made this same decision recently.

Leading up to selling the my previous house I had literally every person I talk to tell me I should keep it as an investment. It's in a HCOL city, but it's a townhouse in a slightly rough neighborhood. Great starter home for my family, but not a rental I wanted to manage. Being a landlord in this city is also fighting upstream against the politics.

The money dropped into my account a few weeks ago from the sale. The profit on the sale was not mind blowing, I bought and sold it for a fair price (2018 -> 2024).

Zero regrets.

I believe in making my own decisions that work for me and my family, not just blindly following the crowd. It's working well so far.

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Be glad you managed to buy a property at all and were able to capitalize on this.

As part of not blindly following the crowd, I took a risk on a startup back in 2017 and took a huge paycut in the hopes it would pay off down the road.

Not only did that not happen (which again, was part of the entire point of taking a risk), I had pissed all my retirement away to stay afloat, changed jobs to start making good money again, but not before real estate got out of control and I'm basically worse off now than I was a decade ago in relative terms, especially since I was affected by the mass tech industry layoffs last year, was unemployed for months, and then secured a job for far less than before, going from 120k down to 50k annual income, which is humiliating and awful. And to top it all off... I don't have any major assets to speak of aside from some money in a ROTH. I'm at the mercy of landlords.

I've been applying at stuff for nearly a year and, aside from the job I'm working at now that I got through the unemployment office, I'm getting nowhere on the job hunt.

Your profit might not be mind blowing, but in my mind, you're way ahead of folks like me that took a different path.

You might be better getting into contracting for a while instead of fulltime. It has it's downsides and a feast/famine sort of cashflow, but it's a quick way to earn while building new trusted contacts and networks to help reveal more fulltime opportunities in future.

I personally would stay away from the online platforms (although others may attest differently), as they can be a race to the bottom in terms of price.

Instead hit up tech meetups in your area, give some talks, and let people know you're a gun for hire. Write some linkedIn posts in your area of expertise (yes folks that overdo this can be a bit cringe, but a little high effort content will go a long way).

Sorry for the late reply, but you're correct on all of that. Thanks for your input and suggestions. :)

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