When Mr. FG and I were living in our basement apartment, we were busily saving up money for a down-payment on a house.
We started looking in the year 2000, and as we shopped, we were starting to get concerned about how much home-buying was going to cost us.
(Which is hilarious to me now because townhouses were around $105,000-$110,000 at the time!)
Anyway, at several points, we wondered if we should shelve the idea, live in the apartment for another year, and save up a bigger downpayment. We really wanted to buy the townhouse (a one-bedroom apartment with a baby is not that fun), but we weren’t sure it was the right time.
Eventually, we decided to go ahead and buy our townhouse, for a whole $104,000.
We couldn’t have known it at the time, but we dodged a serious bullet by buying when we did. That townhouse value had remained stagnant for pretty much the whole 12 years of its existence, but in the five years we owned it, the value soared to $252,000.
So, if we’d made the hard choice to sit out the market to wait and save, we would have ended up in a much worse position!
The decision we made was the best of both worlds; we got to move into a three-bedroom townhouse, and the home appreciation was really wonderful.
I felt (and still feel) so thankful that we got into the housing market when we did because it was such a mercy for our low-earning young selves!
The chances of this happening to us were actually almost zero, but it still felt like we were very fortunate.
My oldest daughter and I took a delayed senior trip for her, a year after she graduated. Instead of going on a drunken cruise with her classmates her senior year, she chose going to New England with just me, later. So in late July 2001, we flew to Vermont. On one leg of the flight, we circled the Statue of Liberty and flew closely by the Twin Towers so we could see them well. Two months later, the Twin Towers were gone, and flights around the Statue were banned. We had flown out of one of the same airports as a doomed airplane flew out of on September 11.
Of course, it was two months after our trip, with different planes and destinations, but the realization that the people on those planes had been just like us — going on vacation, going to an event, traveling for business, just innocently living ordinary lives when their world blew up, hit both my daughter and me hard. I don’t know if I would really call it dodging a bullet, but that’s the first thing that came to my mind at this prompt.
I literally dodged a bullet about thirty years ago. I took a friend’s young son moose hunting. He and I were trudging through the woods and he fell over some root. As he fell, he shot off the rifle he was carrying—despite my checking and lecturing, he did not obsreve the elementary rules about safties and carrying the weapon in a safe manner. I heard the bullet whiz by, it could easily have hit me if I had been slightly to the right. I never took a kid hunting again because this near miss scared me to death.
I can think of two areas: men I didn’t marry, and jobs that I left at just the right time