Bought first home in early 2000s, sold that one and bought another since then. There is no way I would have been able to save up enough to pay cash during that time.
I didn’t claim to have paid all-cash for my house. I had a mortgage, I simply found a predatory by-owner lender and worked through all of his bullshit. They offered my mortgage on balloon, seeing that basically nobody ever managed to get a house paid off during the balloon period. So I did without…basically everything, for 8 years while I put every last penny I had to paying it off before the balloon was due. Lender said he’d been doing this for 45 years and had never seen anyone pull it off and he’d be happy to sell me another any time.
But during this time, I was paying what I would pay in rent, as a mortgage, basically paying MYSELF. Everything I worked so hard for and paid into during that 8 year stint, is STILL MINE. Every penny I paid, I still own. Meanwhile, everyone here sits on renting shit for $2k-3.5k/month and whines about never having enough money for anything.
And if you’re sitting there saying to yourself “30k over 8 years?! wtf that’s not hard?” – well, I was in the middle of my cancer treatments as well, and I can’t work nearly as much as anyone else. So it’s kind of hard to sympathize with the dipshits saying they make $80k/yr and can’t afford a house, when I made it work during cancer treatments and less than $20k/yr.