What personal belongings do you hold most dear?

I guess the thing I can’t live without is my house. I mean, I could, but it would be tough.

People, of course, matter more than anything else and are irreplaceable.

I feel badly that home ownership seems to be out of reach for so many people—especially in Massachusetts. I love my state, but the lack of affordable housing is a major problem.

My husband and I had very lucky timing. We bought our first house in 1995 when our daughter was 6 months old for 155K. It was an antique house with lead paint, no garage, a leaky fieldstone basement, a horrible old kitchen over a crawl space and 1.5 bathrooms. We sold it 9 years later, in 2004, for 385K with some moderate updates (including the kitchen). It went up 148.5% in 9 years!

It was just plain luck. If we’d waited 5 years, it would’ve been mid-housing crisis and things would not have worked out so well.

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