When Your "Home Sweet Home" Becomes Your Albatross

Lest we seem ungrateful, let me just say at the outset that I often cherish our home.  When the afternoon sun hits our west-facing windows during summer dinner parties, or when Will and I sit out on our balcony to watch the sun set, or when I see our dog Katie sprawled out on the granite in front of our living room fireplace, I'm filled with a sense of contentment and--especially if we have actually cleaned the living room--even a certain amount of home-pride.  But...

The fact is, it's not because we love our home that we opted to stay in Chicago when there were offers a couple of years ago for Will to move out west for his career.  Sure, I have a tenured teaching position here, but that wasn't the only reason either.  In addition to whatever other reasons, the truth is that our home is something of an obstacle to an ideal "sabbatical life."

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In May 2006, we sold our Chicago bungalow and went to live in England for Will's ex-pat assignment through his work.  Initially we were slightly concerned that we would not be able to sell our house quickly since we shared a driveway with our neighbor--an oddity of a few areas in Chicago neighborhoods which didn't have alleyway garages.  We were delighted when we received, after our first open house, an offer very close to the asking price.  On the whole, our Chicago house brought us a decent profit after only six years of living in it.

We fear that this relatively successful housing experience might have produced too-rosy an impression on our minds about the prospect of home ownership.  After all, it was the first home that Will and I bought together as a couple--just a month before we got married--and we were able to sell it without any of the hassle (well, ok, maybe just a little hassle) we expected would come along with the process of unloading a house right before moving to another continent for a year.

We were ecstatic to be free and in the clear, without a mortgage, without the responsibilities of home maintenance--and that constant yard work!  In retrospect we realize that we were completely un-expert about real estate and simply got very lucky, but we didn't understand the full extent of our cluelessness until later.

As the ex-pat assignment neared its conclusion, we started to shop around online, from England, for another home back in the U.S.  We came back to the Chicago area in February for a home-shopping trip, but, of course, we had no idea in the Spring of 2007, especially after being out of the country for most of the previous year, what catastrophe was about to hit the housing market...

Suffice it to say that, given only a profitable experience with the housing marking, we plunged right in and blithely purchased our second home together: a new construction "luxury" mid-rise condominium in a suburb bordering Chicago.  Every single element of that description now would make us run screaming from the housing market! (In case you do not know, Chicago-area housing, especially for new construction condominiums, never really recovered the way other housing markets elsewhere have.)

As we reflect on the (terrible terrible) decision to buy a home during a jet-lagged week-long visit from another country (!!!), we realize that there were many faulty assumptions we were making.

Leaving aside all the issues surrounding the often unquestioned motivations for purchasing a house (Everyone says buying is better than renting!) and the wisdom of its investment value (It's "real" estate, and so it's a  more tangible and concrete form of investment than stocks and bonds!), we realize now something about purchasing a home.

Buying a home can tie you down SO much more than renting.

After we walked the Camino de Santiago in the summer of 2013, we discovered that we were interested in pursuing a lifestyle that involved a LOT more flexibility--leisure travel, career mobility, perhaps even location-independent work, and, when we were ready to leave our careers, living in various different areas both within the U.S. and abroad.

But, alas, we have a home that we cannot unload without a huge financial loss.  If we were to sell our condo right now, at the market price for it (according to Zillow), we would be able to get only 55% of the price we paid for it.  That's up slightly from 2-3 years ago when we could only have gotten about 40-45% of our purchase price, but no one wants to buy a home and hold onto it for 11 years (we purchased in May 2007), so that we could sell it for 55% of what we paid for it, right?

Thus, we are stuck in limbo, wishing to be more mobile, but also wanting to avoid a major financial mistake (or compounding the huge mistake we made by purchasing it in the first place).  And it's not exactly easy to rent out our home at what would be its normal market value, given the optics of a building clearly under major construction (see below) to address structural problems left unfixed by the building's original developers who, of course, disappeared with the housing crisis.  In the meantime, we keep paying the hefty special assessments reluctantly but rightly levied by the home owner's association to deal with our various problems.

All those other owners in our building who, years earlier, sold their units at a significant loss or those who simply walked away from their homes almost seem prescient now.

The only thing that makes this home ownership debacle (slightly) less nightmarish is that we (mostly) enjoy living in our unit and in our town.  If those positive factors also showed up in the negative column, we really should have left long ago, despite the steep costs of cutting our losses.

So what to do now...?