Buying a house used to be a key aspect of the American Dream, but for some time now, it’s been becoming more and more out of reach for most young people.
My wife and I bought our first house in 1992, a small, 1,008-square-foot ranch house in a suburb of Denver. We paid $69,500 for that home, where we were living when two of our kids were born. In 1997, my career in medical manufacturing was starting to take off, so we sold the first house – for twice what we paid for it, $140,000, and put down $189,000 for the 4,800-square-foot, great barn of a house where we raised our family. When we bought our house in Alaska, we sold that property for a whopping $585,000.
Now, you can see we came out of those deals pretty well. We had made a lot of improvements to both houses, but most of the gain was just due to the runaway Denver-area real estate market. We were…
