Having moved over a dozen times in my life, bought and sold 7 different homes, made money and lost money on investments, and held a dozen different jobs, I have frequently lamented my “bad timing”.
- I’ve bought one house during a peak bubble and sold it at a significant loss after a real estate crash.
- Several of my homes I purchased for the current market rate only to learn later that my neighbors all purchased years earlier when prices were 50% lower.
- I invested in the internet startup I worked for in 2000, only to lose it all when the company went bankrupt after the dotcom crash.
- Many of the companies I worked for had major layoffs in which I lost my job.
- Almost every place I worked went out of business within a few years after I worked there.
My timing wasn’t all bad.
- I worked my way into tech sales during the dot-com boom and was able to have a moderately successful 25 year career.
- Several times, I was in exactly the right place at the right time selling the right product and was able to do quite well.
- A couple of houses I sold at a profit due to short term market appreciation.
What I’ve learned is that I have no control over doing something at the “right time”.
There’s always going to be a better time than right now to: buy/sell a house, switch careers, invest, get married, buy a car, and so on.
You can always find someone who had better timing. And, irritatingly, they will often be the first to tell you about how smart they were to do so.
They weren’t smart. They were lucky. Just like I was sometimes.
It’s easy to give yourself credit for making great decisions in hindsight. If we could predict the future, we’d all be millionaires who invested at the right time, bought a mansion after a housing crash, got the best deal on a luxury car and accepted a new job at the perfect time.
I think of people who had “good timing” the same way I think of Instagram celebrities and Internet millionaires. There’s always going to be someone better looking, richer and living a better life (purportedly).
And there’s always going to be someone who had better timing too.
I deal with my envy of both the same way, I let it go and move on with living my life.
