Why I Just Bought A House (For The 1st Time In My Life At Age 55) | Adam Taggart & Melody Wright

**Adam Taggart** (0:01)
As many of the regular viewers of this channel know, I bought a house recently, and what's notable about that in my case is I'm 55, it's the first time in my life I've become a homeowner.
And a lot of people have been asking me, whoa, why did you buy a house now? Especially when you've had a lot of housing analysts on who've been saying that the future of the housing market definitely looks challenged from here. Totally understand that question. I'm going to answer any and all questions that I can about my particular home buying journey here. So what we're going to do today is turn the table a little bit, and I'm going to be interviewed by housing analyst Melody Wright.
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host Adam Taggart. And today we're going to do something a little bit different, folks. As many of the regular viewers of this channel know, I bought a house recently, and what's notable about that in my case is I'm 55 It's the first time in my life I've become a homeowner. And a lot of people have been asking me, whoa, why did you buy a house now? Especially when you've had a lot of housing analysts on who've been saying that the future of the housing market definitely looks challenged from here. Totally understand that question. I'm going to answer any and all questions that I can about my particular home buying journey here. I want to say at the start, folks, my situation is not the common situation. So I still think there's things to learn about my experience here. But I'm not saying that what I did is the right thing for the vast majority of people to do.
Just want to get that really clear right off the bat. So what we're going to do today is turn the table a little bit, and I'm going to be interviewed by housing analyst Melody Wright. Melody, thanks so much for doing this.

**Melody Wright** (1:59)
You're welcome. I'm not sure how good of a job I'm going to do, Adam, but I'll do my best.

**Adam Taggart** (2:03)
You're going to do great. Just pitch this off balls and I'll swing the cards again. Folks, you may realize as Melody starts talking here, her voice is a little raspy.
She's getting over some sort of cold, but she promises me that she feels better than she did a week ago and she's up for this. So I'm not making her do this under dress.

**Melody Wright** (2:23)
Just want to make that clear. Thank you.

**Adam Taggart** (2:28)
All right. So Melody, we can kind of start anywhere. Maybe real quick, I'll ask myself the first question and we'll get to any that you have, which is, hey, Adam, you know, like, what is your journey been up to this point of deciding to buy a house?
Longtime viewers of the channel have probably heard the story before, but in probably like 2022 or sorry, 2002 or 2003, my wife and I had recently started a family. So we were starting to get serious about, okay, well, we should get it, start our home and, you know, start becoming homeowners. And two things happened that were really influential to me.
One was we started looking at homes. We were living in the Palo Alto Menlo Park area at the time, being renters. I've been a renter my whole life, as I just said earlier. And the homes that we would go visit that were like just one notch up from a teardown, like the lowest of starter homes in that area, were like $800,000.
And this was back in 23 years ago or so.
And my wife was still really eager on getting a home. So we got a realtor and we found one or two of these homes that we thought, okay, I mean, it's going to need some work, but we're willing to commit. And our realtor said, okay, that's great. Glad you found a home. Just so you know, if you want the home, you're going to have to overbid for it, probably by at least $100,000. So at this point, I'm just thinking like, I'm really uncomfortable with this. But I followed the advice, and we had a couple of homes in a row where we put it in our bid, and we put it in over 100,000 of the asking price. And at least twice this happened, where the house was bought by somebody else, and the seller didn't even invite us to counter their offer. Like it was so far above ours, the seller was like, no, I'm fine with this, we don't need you guys. So that was really confusing and demoralizing. And as I was trying to wrestle, how to find a way to buy a house down there at that time, I went online because I was thinking, look, I just spent a ton of money going to Stanford Business School. And I don't understand why people are willing to spend this much money on a depreciating wooden box that clearly is going to need a lot of work going forward. So I started researching online the housing market, thinking that I was missing a piece of the puzzle. I was looking for the information that was going to say, hey, Adam, this is why you should do it, right? This is the compelling reason why you should do it. And instead, I found myself to voices that were warning of a housing bubble. And so now, this is like 2004, 2005 And the more I researched this, the more I started to get confident that, you know what, I think my gut feeling was right, that it's not worth buying homes, that the price is high, the value is low. And so I started just intentionally sitting it out. I sat down with my wife, I explained to her all the data that I was seeing, and she was disappointed, but she was like, yeah, I mean, this seems to make sense. And for the next like two or three years, I was the crazy guy, right? We go to cocktail parties with our friends and people will be like, oh my God, this guy thinks the housing market is going to correct. I mean, what a joke, right? Because it was only going up year after year after year. And then the housing bubble burst and the GFC ensued. And so for a brief moment in time, I looked like a complete genius. I had several people come up to me, like actively seek me out to apologize and just say, Adam, I'm really sorry. I thought you were nuts. I did make a little bit of fun at your expense. And man, were you proven right. So those were big influences on me in the housing market. Now, at some point, when there's a correction, you want to man up and buy in.