Don’t wait for housing prices to fall

My wife and I are empty-nesters, and our house is too big for just the two of us now. We talked about selling the house and moving into an apartment in a multi-use development with retail and restaurants that we go to several times a week. Then, in a year or so, buying a smaller house when housing prices go back down. How do you feel about this idea?

A: I like the idea of downsizing. My wife and I did the same kind of thing recently. But at this point, I’d say there’s about a 99% chance the housing market is not going down. It has gone down two times in the past 100 years — way back during the 1930s and again in 2008. And the market snapped back fairly fast after 2008.

I don’t think the price of housing is going to go down at all anytime soon. I do believe the housing market’s rate of increase will slow down, but that still kind of defeats your premise of renting until then.

I wouldn’t be opposed to you two buying a different property in the same area and just moving in, but I’m not going to tell you to go rent something right now. That would put you in a hole with the rental amount, plus the fact that housing prices are probably going to continue to rise, even if not at the pace they’ve risen recently.