We have four options:
- get rich
- stay working forever
- kill ourselves
- move to the woods
That's a much nicer, larger house than almost all of our grandparents grew up in (plus has some great bonuses such as running water). Definitely larger than you need when you're retired, but maybe you want plenty of room for grandkids to visit.
You now need $272k cash. Not undoable but as previously mentioned:
- get rich
I doubt it. There may have been a time when most people on HN were startup founders, but it doesn't seem to be the case today.
> mean you'll have likely missed a bill or two, and your credit is ruined, and you'll never get a loan.
I don't have any failed startups, but I have missed plenty of bills, including going more than a year without paying a mortgage before short selling the house.
Credit isn't perfect now, but was able to swing a home loan on reasonable terms only a couple years after; missing a few bills isn’t a “you can never get a loan for life” situation.
Doesn't your house get repossessed if you do this, and you end up with nothing? I accept I may be wrong here, but I've been told the above a thousand times.
Foreclosure is a long and expensive process and can result in very bad deals for the lender. Particularly during and in a fairly long shadow after the Great Recession, lenders were very reluctant to pull the trigger on that if they believed they could get a better resolution, and for most of the time I wasn't paying I was in the process of trying to get the bank to approve the short sale (had a potential buyer lined up.) Also, had located and, during the time in question, moved into a rental with an independent landlord and no management company who was more-than-typically flexible in assessing credit, so wasn't dependent on having the house. (Because of the same changed market conditions that left the first home loan underwater, the rental of a larger home in a better neighborhood was also less than the mortgage on the underwater one.)
Yes, though, foreclosure was a risk, but in a no-recourse state with an underwater loan being left “with nothing” is better from a narrow financial perspective (potentially worse for other reasons without alternate housing arranged, given how credit can effect that) than having the house and mortgage,
bankruptcy stays on your credit file for just 7 years. And nobody is going to care about a missed bill or two in 2-3 years. As long as you don't take any payday loans, that is.
Does that count as retiring? Presumably you'd still need money for stuff like electricity and manufactured goods that you can't make/forge yourself. Not to mention all the forging/hunting/crafting you'd have to do to sustain yourself.
- keep healthy
- increase ownership of capital
- achieve age escape velocity