Today I signed the papers to sell a house I’ve owned for more than a decade. Most people celebrate selling a house. I locked in one of the biggest financial losses of my life. As of today, I no longer own a home — and strangely, I feel lighter than I have in years.
Let me tell you the whole story, because it’s a big part of why I invest the way I do now. This is Part 1.
The dream (2014)
Back in 2014, I had grown from a fresh graduate into a real engineer with a steady career and big dreams. I bought my family’s first proper home — at what turned out to be the absolute peak of the market — for about $240,000. For two or three years, we were genuinely happy there. It felt like everything was finally coming together.
The storm (2016–2019)
Then in 2016, the shipbuilding industry — my industry — fell into a deep downturn. In 2017 I left my company and entered the hardest stretch of my life. From 2017 to early 2019 was my darkest period. At one point I even flew to the United States and worked a temporary job at Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia for about three months. It’s a fond memory now. Back then, it was survival.
The house that wouldn’t sell
When I tried to sell the house in 2017, the same downturn that had taken my job had also dragged down the property market. Its value had already slipped to around $200,000. I couldn’t sell it. So it stopped being our home and became a rental — someone else’s home. I collected rent, but after paying the mortgage interest, my actual income from it was basically zero. For years it just sat there: an albatross around my neck, a burden I couldn’t shake.
The number (today)
So what did I finally sell that house for today? About $140,000. That’s roughly 40% below what I paid for it.
Korea is famous for its “real estate always wins” mythology. That was never my story. After COVID, there was an explosive property boom — people I knew were “making money in their sleep,” headlines about prices doubling overnight. My house went the other way, year after year. I slowly made peace with a simple truth: real estate and I were just never meant to be.
The Number, Honestly
A 40% loss is the headline, and it’s the kindest way to say it. Let me say the unkind version, because this blog doesn’t work if I only publish the flattering arithmetic.
I paid about $240,000 in 2014. Twelve years later I sold for roughly 40% less. But the purchase price isn’t what the house cost me. Over twelve years there was mortgage interest, acquisition and property taxes, maintenance, and the repairs you make when a place refuses to sell. None of that appears in the 40%.
The true cost of owning that house is meaningfully worse than the number in my title. I don’t have a clean figure for it, and I’m not going to invent one. But I want to be honest that the headline understates it rather than let anyone assume it’s the whole story.
What I do have is the part that matters more: I walked away with no debt. After twelve years, one downturn, and a period I’ll describe below, the outcome was a loss and a clean slate. There were versions of this where I kept the house and the debt, and I don’t think those versions end better.
The Comparison Everyone Makes
Whenever I tell this story, someone does the same mental arithmetic within about four seconds: what if you’d put that money in the S&P 500 instead?
They’re right about the direction. Money invested in a broad US index at the start of 2014 and left alone, with dividends reinvested, has multiplied several times over by now. Against a 40% loss, the gap is not close, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
But the comparison is also a fantasy, and it’s worth explaining why, because the reason is the actual lesson.
I never had $240,000 to invest. I had a deposit and a large loan. Nobody was going to lend me $240,000 to buy index funds. The leverage that made the house possible is the same leverage that turned a market decline into a 40% hole. And I had to live somewhere; the alternative wasn’t “invest the money instead,” it was “pay rent and invest the difference,” which is a much smaller and much less exciting number.
So the clean comparison doesn’t exist. What’s left is the uncomfortable part I can’t argue my way out of: I made one enormous, leveraged, undiversified bet, and I made it at the top. Everything I do now is a reaction to that sentence.
Why this made me a different investor
Losing on that house — while everyone around me seemed to win on theirs — is a big part of why I became so committed to what I do now: steady, boring, broad-market investing. Dollar-cost averaging. The long game. Instead of putting everything into one big, concentrated bet on a single asset in a single city, I now spread small, consistent amounts across the whole market, every single month. The house taught me — the expensive way — about the risks I can’t control, and the importance of not betting my whole future on one roll of the dice.
What I Actually Got Wrong
“I bought at the peak” is the easy summary and the least useful one, because nobody knows where the peak is until afterwards. Here is what I’d actually do differently, and all of it transfers to investing.
1. I put everything into one asset and called it safety. A home felt like the responsible choice, the opposite of speculation. But concentration doesn’t become safe because the asset is made of concrete. It was one property, in one city, in one country, bought with borrowed money. If I described that as a stock position, you’d call it reckless.
2. My job and my house were the same bet. This is the one that took me years to see, and it’s the most important thing in this article. I worked in shipbuilding. My home’s value depended on a regional economy driven by the same industry. When that industry fell in 2016, my income and my largest asset fell together — exactly when I needed one of them to hold. That isn’t bad luck. That’s correlation, and I’d built it into my life without noticing.
It’s the reason I now deliberately own a global index of hundreds of companies that have nothing to do with my paycheque. If my industry has another bad decade, I want my savings to be somewhere else entirely.
3. I couldn’t get out when I wanted to. A house takes months or years to sell, and it takes longest precisely when everyone else also wants to sell. I could not choose my exit date. That experience is why I now keep a meaningful cash buffer and why I care so much that my investments can be sold on any ordinary Tuesday, even though I hope never to do it.
4. I let a decision become an identity. Long after the numbers said this wasn’t working, I held on, because selling meant admitting something. The loss got larger while I protected my self-image. Cutting a position because the reasoning changed is not failure; refusing to look is.
The turning point
Here’s the part that lets me breathe. Today, the deposit — about $14,000 — landed in my account. On October 8th, the rest is due. After I pay off the remaining loan, taxes, fees, and everything else, I’ll be left with roughly $80,000 in cash.
Yes, I took a real loss. But look at it another way: I am now completely debt-free, and I’m holding a meaningful amount of money that could become the biggest turning point in my investing life.
Why I Don’t Call It a Mistake
I’ve been careful with the word “mistake” throughout this, and that’s deliberate.
In 2014 I was a young engineer with a growing career, a family, and every reason to believe the future pointed up. Buying a home was what people in my position did, and what most people around me were doing. The information available then did not say “this is the top.” Nothing ever does.
Judging a decision by its outcome rather than by the reasoning available at the time is one of the most reliable ways to learn the wrong lesson. My reasoning was genuinely flawed — the concentration, the correlation with my own income, the leverage. Those were errors I could have seen. “Bought at the peak” was not.
And my family lived there for twelve years. Some of that time was the happiest we’ve had. That isn’t a line item, but it isn’t nothing either.
What happens next
What will I do with the ~$14,000 now, and the ~$80,000 coming in October? Honestly, I don’t have a plan yet. I’m going to think it through slowly, and I’m going to share every step of that process right here — the decisions, the doubts, and the results. I’m genuinely curious how it’ll turn out myself.
The one thing I know for sure: slow and steady, one step at a time.
Today’s takeaway is simple, and a little bittersweet — as of today, I don’t own a home anymore. But maybe that’s exactly where my real story begins.
This is Part 1 of a series. In the next parts, I’ll walk through how I decide to put this money to work — in real time, with real numbers.
This is not financial advice — just one 40-something engineer’s honest notes on his own investing journey. Please do your own research or talk to a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.
Questions I Get Asked
Do you regret buying a home at all?
Not the home. The structure — one leveraged asset tied to the same economy as my job. I’d buy a place to live again. I would not let it be almost all of my net worth again.
Is renting better than buying, then?
I don’t think that’s a question with a universal answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What I’ll say is that buying is usually presented as the automatically responsible choice, and mine was the single largest financial risk I’ve ever taken.
How long did it take to recover emotionally?
Longer than the sale took. The strange part is that signing the papers felt like relief rather than grief. Carrying an asset you’ve stopped believing in costs something that doesn’t appear on any statement.
Would you have sold sooner if you could go back?
Yes, and it’s the clearest lesson here. The loss I locked in was not caused by the market falling. It was made larger by the years I spent hoping it would come back.