Moving again...and the death of Elvis Presley

What we didn't know about moving to Atlanta was...we weren't. It took four months to sell the Red Oak house, but if we'd sold sooner we'd have bought a home in Georgia in a buyer's market. There were many homes for sale, some desperately in need of a buyer, and those homes stayed on market for months and months. Instead of purchasing, as some of the other new employees for the manufactured housing group had done, we rented a place in Doraville, Georgia, for six weeks. It was crazy. We hauled all our belongings to a storage unit and wandered around Atlanta discovering Krispy Kreme donuts and Stone Mountain. Many of those who'd already purchased homes there in anticipation of working in Atlanta still hadn't sold their homes in the down market a year later. We were spared that trauma.

When the time came, the moving truck alleviated us of anything extraneous, and we loaded up our daughters in two cars, a Chevy Vega (yes, we had a Vega and actually drove it for over 100,000 miles before it broke down) and our new red and white Cutlass Supreme. Guess which car I drove? The red one, for those who don't personally know me. It was August of 1977. A long hot drive across the US to Riverside, California, where Bill worked for a company whose new president was from Riverside and so decided everyone in the company should live there, too. We'd just left the Texas-New Mexico border when Bill pulled up beside me holding a handwritten sign against the driver's side window for me to read: ELVIS IS DEAD. I laughed because I thought he was making some joke I might understand when he spelled it out for me at the next rest stop. Since he didn't get a response from me, he pulled up again, showed me the same sign, so I turned on the radio. Sure enough, August 16, 1977, as we drove merrily along, the King was leaving planet Earth. 

We'd been shocked when we took our home buying trip from Georgia to California at the horribly high prices of homes here. We'd sold the Red Oak home for enough that we had about $6000 in cash to spend on a new place. Homes in Atlanta were comparably priced to those in Texas, but California was a wholly other thing. We paid a whopping $45,000 for a 1200 square foot, three bedroom, one and a half bath home on a corner lot on the west end of town. The same home in Texas would have sold for $26,000. We gulped, put our money down and trusted we'd made the right decision. 

Again, it wasn't easy. Bill and I had made a promise to each other that I would stay at home with our kids so the financial burden was on him. I had a little side business out of our home as a hair dresser (I'd helped work my way through college working in beauty salons), made our clothes, planted a garden and kept the house clean (very Donna Reed without the dress and heels). We had lots of adventures in Riverside including a hot air balloon that landed in distress at the end of the street one mid-morning. But it was a short-lived time. Bill got a better job back in Texas within eighteen months, and the need to sell and buy again was upon us. This time, however, we were selling a California property. In eighteen months, with some peeling away of awful wallpaper, a lot of cleaning up and some new paint on the walls, our home was in great shape to get top dollar. We found a realtor who knew the area. He had two open houses. Two buyers. A mini bidding war. We sold it for $62,000. That's quite a return on investment for a young family! And we were moving to Texas where we could buy a small mansion for $50,000...which we did. Brand new, too.

This Riverside home last sold in 2010 for $196,000. The Zestimate on it today is...wait for it...$371,595. 

Our home in Riverside today--still cute, huh?

Bottom Line: There are often trade-offs when investing in anything. Real estate is no exception. We weren't as good at putting money aside back then, saving from each pay check in anticipation of a need. We pretty much lived from month to month. But we were smart enough to buy a home, take care of it, do without the luxuries others might have so that we could reap the returns when we sold. It's still the way upward. Purchase a home when you can, keep it until the market creates enough equity, sell for something a little bigger...repeat. Real estate cycles up and down, so if you buy in a low cycle and sell in a high cycle, that's the best case scenario. Some investors feel it is still one of the very best investment choices available.