I can only say what I did, but when I came into money I put most of it into a house. I know I'm going to stay here for quite some time so I bought a nice house on a half acre and paid a good chunk of it off. Now my mortgage is lower than my former rent so I get to keep a larger chunk of my paycheck every month. The stock market and investing always seemed like gambling to me, but I'll always need a roof over my head and the sooner I can secure that, the better.
I feel you, but I also live in the SF bay area. I still can't really afford to put a comfortable percentage down on a house, and even if I could, housing around here seems very unnatural, so it freaks me out. Houses that were less than 100k 6 years ago are easily half a million now and that's spooky to me.
yeah. I have a very small amount of money that I manage for stocks - I wanted to invest in video game companies and it worked out rather well. Otherwise I put my 10% in a 401k and the rest to the house. My wife, on the other hand, is a fastidious saver and could probably buy a house outright with what she has saved.
I feel like real estate that one lives in will always be a good use of money. Maybe not always a good investment in the sense of a return on investment, but if it's one's literal home, is a gain or loss relevant? I owned during the real estate crash in 2007. It felt like it sucked, but in retrospect, I didn't sell and didn't need to sell, so now ten years later, it didn't matter. Do you feel like a half acre gives you a good deal of privacy, or is it more like homes stacked together, just with kind of big yard space? I'm looking at buying land to eventually build a private home on and am trying to get a scale for minimum lot size.
I like the half acre, we wanted more but it's a good compromise of land and location. We looked at a lot of places that had about the same size lot and it really came down to the landscaping and neighborhood. Ours feels pretty secluded because there's a lot of trees and shrubs that the neighborhood is invested in keeping. The few places that aren't covered are places we're going to put in screen plants to help promote that secluded feeling. We also have enough room for a garden, a clothes line, and a large shed. So that's nice.