My wife and I officially sold our fairly new condo today, and we have bought a split level house, circa 1969, with some amazing updates for $20,000 less than what we bought the condo for three years ago. This I attribute to the housing market bubble popping.

Now the condo has been nice. It was a new construction when we bought it, nice and open design with all of the bells and whistles. But what happened was that a few months ago we realized that we were becoming house poor. The budget I planned for the condo kept getting blown out of the water from unexpected expenses. I didn’t properly plan on emergencies and raises that we didn’t get due to the economic downfall we have all experienced.

After a couple of years of being tight on cash we decided we were mainly paying for the area we were living in and could do with a less expensive house.

So, now we will be saving about $300 a month in mortgage and taxes and we were able to get our money back out of the sale of the condo. Unfortunately we didn’t make anything, but at least we didn’t lose our butts.

Hopefully the money being saved will be going into savings. Up next is my goal for a lower car payment.