We need to sell our house to reach our FIRE amount. It needs to be invested in index funds rather than a house that doesn't generate stash. I made a conservative estimate of what we can sell it for. We can lose 10% compared to what we payed for it 2,5 years ago to still be on schedule for FIRE. But we might also have overpaid for our house...
We know from our previous house that selling a house requires a BIG investment of your time and effort and is very stressful. Especially to do all this work beside a fulltime job. Our current house is standing on the top of a hill with 2 terribly steep roads towards it, where cars without 4x4 often get stuck in the winter. Therefore we want to sell the house when there is no snow, roughly from april to november. In May we will need to compete with many other villas on the market, as that is the busiest month for villa sale.
I think we will reach our additional FIRE stash some months into 2019. We also need to work long enough to finance 2019, because we can only afford to stop working from 2020, given we get enough money for our current house. We are probably not done working before at least half of 2019 has passed.
We know that selling houses in our neighbourhood goes slowly. It can take several months, if not longer.
Another issue is that our lower status community will be joining a higher status neighbour community on Jan 1rst 2020 and the community name will be that of the higher status community. We think people will be willing to pay slightly more for the house when it is in that higher status community. I see current houses on sale, advertising that it will be in the higher status community in 2020.
If we manage to sell in 2019, we will know for sure that we have enough stash to FIRE. It also gives us the freedom to start moving elsewhere whenever it suits us.
Selling in 2020 might in theory generate a higher price, because of the new community. House prices might also have changed (+ or -) by then, nobody knows ahead of time. We should have plenty of time to prepare the house for selling, if we would quit working in 2020. If would give us time to prepare FIRE while living in our current house. But it would also bind us to stay there longer than we want to.
Maybe we should start working PT in 2019 to free up some time to prepare the house for selling?
What do you people think is the smartest thing to do for us? Sell the house in 2019 or in 2020?