Before you buy a condo, please do yourself a favor and read a few of the many HOA threads. A house doesn’t necessarily come with a high-maintenance yard, but at least you will get to decide for yourself what it looks like.
Been there, done that, never again.
ETA: And congratulations on your windfall. Your hubby’s grandma is a great lady!
I’ve never gotten into Options (sounded too fiddly) but you can find 1-year from now target price analytics for certain stocks, whether certain analytics groups are recommending to buy or sell, etc. So far as I’ve ever been able to tell, that’s nearly all junk with about as much meaning as a horoscope.
I think they’re just grabbing bottom-dollar analysis that they can use to flesh out their UI and make it feel data-full. Any good, competent analysis would cost too much money to provide to average users. In this case, the people that they’re hiring are probably just doing a straight linear line from the previous year, or something.
I wouldn’t trust it.
Not so fast, at least out here in the great west many, many single-family homes are also in HOAs. Basically the bulk of newer, master-planned communities have them. They’re spreading insidiously like a cancer and you’ll never stop them until they’ve covered the earth 
!
Actually I think my (pretty pricey) HOA does a fairly decent job, all in all. It’s certainly better than many I’ve heard anecdotes about. They seem fiscally responsible, stay on top of maintenance issues and mostly aren’t martinets (usually, there have been a few conflicts here and there).
Or - nowadays more than likely - AI
As to HOAs, yes, there are horror stories out on the internet. The people in happy HOAs don’t post screeds.
Condos, depending on the design of the buildings, have a very different dynamic. People buying a unit in a highrise don’t mistakenly believe they have 100% control of all they survey. As someone buying a free-standing house in an HOA might be foolish or ignorant enough to believe.
My own experience with owning in an HOA was utterly happy. It prevented me from doing nothing, and prevented the worst of my neighbors from doing the worst things they wanted to do. And provided far more civic amenities than the city outside the HOA was able to do.
We definitely need to do our research. The biggest concern I have is the fees getting out of hand. My understanding is they vary wildly.
But just looking at realistically what we can afford right now, it may be a temporary thing to get us out of the manufactured home. I actually really like this house (2,000 square feet, with some great amenities) but I don’t like having a depreciating asset. And it’s starting to get old and I don’t really want to put a bunch of money into it.
May I never complain about his family again. (Knock on wood.)
I can’t even tell you what it feels like. I’ll have to keep in mind for future reference that sometimes the most financially savvy thing isn’t the thing that makes you feel the best, or most secure. Our loan payments were $500/month so she didn’t just erase the debt, she gave us back $6,000 a year for the next nine years. That really could be the difference in cash flow that allows us to buy a house.
I keep forgetting that buying a house is a transfer of wealth more than spending money. You know, that it’s an investment. So much of this stuff is a new way of thinking for me.
Hope I’m not quoting out of context, but this is definitely something I went through. It used to always be what I call “spreadsheet” thinking. I understood the numbers, but the action felt forced onto me. “Don’t pay off your house because that money is better invested” “don’t do this, because you’re missing out on that” “that’s financially dumb” - all true on a spreadsheet, but didn’t feel true to me.
I think the psychological burden has a price for each person and it’s absolutely worth paying for. Or to think about differently, what would I pay not to have to worry about paying my mortgage off every month. If I’m fine giving up some likely but not guaranteed returns in the market, that’s a good business decision because I’m buying something with that - sleeping sound at night; less stress; etc. That’s invaluable.
Of course, everyone is different and to each their own.
Good points overall. But …
I’d tweak this a bit.
The psychological cost is just one more cost among many. It’s wrong, as you say, to assign it zero dollar value while making your tradeoffs. But that doesn’t mean you should make it the single most important factor regardless of how many dollars you have to throw away to buy some incremental reduction in anxiety.
Some people are just wired to be scared all the time. Some people have absorbed a lesson that all debt in any amount is horrifically dangerous. I knew someone who paid their credit card online every night so they weren’t in debt when they went to sleep.
For others there is no amount of assets that are enough to offset having any debt whatsoever. There is no amount of assets they can’t imagine might be lost, so they need to save ever more just in case.
Someone like that is probably congenitally incapable of making financial decisions that are both sound and comfortable to their psyche. Perhaps they could be trained. If they so wanted. But decent bet most such folks will be very averse to such training. Just as many phobics would much rather suffer with their affliction then endure the discomfort of being conditioned out of it.
I’m sort of a reformed version of this person. I was taught that debt was bad, period. I internalized this. The past decades have been a slow unlearning of that absolute, mostly through my husband, who was taught to think about money like a wealthy person.
But I really worry about money a lot. I think I worry about money more than many people who have much less of it. Because I used to have less, and started my adult life with basically nothing, it’s hard to escape that feeling that it will all be taken away. Sometimes I feel like I’ve won a game show, that what I have is almost not even real.
It’s good in the sense that I don’t take it for granted, but I have to ask myself how necessary it is for me to worry so much. I would make a distinction here between worrying and making good choices. I don’t mean I should be more careless in my choices. But just, if I could relax. If I could just relax and enjoy what we have. I don’t know what the magic threshold is. Perhaps that too is illusory.
You remind me of people who lived through the depression. That’s not a dig. It is mindset from having had so little and extremely large fear of loss.
Agree with @LSLGuy - relief of that anxiety is worth something but that does not mean letting it rule you. And are finding the way to navigate that as comfortably as possible as a family. Were we all as self aware and having as open of conversations about it!
An unhappy one here. We had an HOA clause on our house in Florida. Every year the fees rose substantially. And they didn’t provide any value as far as I can see: just hassled us repeatedly and threateningly about very minor cosmetic issues.
I swore a Mighty Oath that Never Again will we buy a house with an HOA encumberance.
Just one anecdotal data point.
I hope this is not seen as overly sloppy, let’s call it human curated AI-resumed news (var. sources, easily googleable):
92% Growth Attribution: Harvard economist Jason Furman calculated that investment in information processing equipment and software (predominantly AI-related infrastructure and data centers) was responsible for 92% of total U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025.
It seems that DJT has been (once again) falling UP the stairs, economy wise … which of course bears heavy risk of waking up to a hugely different economy as we thought we’d wake up to …(and that is BEFORE any crash)
thoughts ?
I am a believer that past is prologue. So I believe AI will make a big impact on our lives and economy, but only after this generation of the technology goes through its bubble, and a next generation rises from the ashes and makes AI work.
As I said, I’m not writing this on my Commodore Laptop, and I haven’t used Ask Jeeves yet today.
Now if I could tell you when that would happen, I’d be asking Jeeves to do a Google search for me.
My expectation is that investments for the AI centers will have impacts on other aspects of the economy, driving demand for energy generation not as risk of disruption and massive price fluctuations, including nuclear and renewables. Other industries will benefit from that.
Have any of you been watching silver? It has been going crazy lately, speculation the Chinese are trying to lock up everything on the market, a lot of big banks facing short squeezes, etc. I’m anticipating our Dear Leader getting a whisper in his ear soon that will lead to an attempt to nationalize Mexican Ag mines. After all, if he can declare that Venezuelan oil belongs to him, why not Mexican silver? There’s a Reddit thread with more info:
An Ounce of Silver Is Now Worth More Than a Barrel of Oil. : r/investing Reddit - The heart of the internet
On a personal note, I bought 1000 oz at about $30/oz early in the year & it’s been my most successful investment of 2025.
Interesting moment to post this: Silver suddenly fell by 9% today. Still it is much higher than two weeks ago, not to mention YTD.
Gold also fell, but only 4%. Which is still a lot for gold, but it is also still much higher than last month, when it was higher than ever before.
They both had big jumps up during the last week and came back to where they were before that. I’m thinking these are end of year allocation balancing profit taking goofiness.
Recap -
The year is ending with the S&P500 up about 17%, total bonds index up 3%, gold up 64%, Vanguard value index up 13%, FTSE up 21%.
Some individual international markets have done even better. Portugal’s up 30% and Israel’s over 50%, for example.
Feel free to add other year performances that you think are broadly reflective.
So first - news has been full of stories about tariffs and AI; what do you think are the most important stories that have not dominated the headlines from the investment perspective?
Second, anyone brave enough to put down their predictions for what the performance of those major metrics will be by 12/31/2026?
I personally have zero confidence and feel that we could see as much growth in each or more, or all dropping 50%!
If gun to head I’d bet on gold continuing its run, an AI correction, pulling down some infrastructure stocks with it but the overall market still doing well, and value (and equity focused) stocks over performing.
Anyone willing to play? 
An article on the BBC, suggested that gold (and other precious metals) were becoming the preferred hedge against using the US Dollar as a reserve currency. It noted that China and Japan among others are reducing their Dollar holdings. Not dramatically, as they don’t want to disrupt the markets, but steadily.
The United States of America has very considerable debt.
I predict that the major US indices will continue to rise throughout 2026, although probably not as big of an annual increase as 2025.
I also predict that US Treasuries will continue to slowly slide downward throughout the year, much like 2025.
Of course, I thought the Chiefs would be back in the Super Bowl this year.