In 1978, we bought our first house in Belmont, California (San Francisco Peninsula). Three (small) bedrooms (one of which served as my home office), 1½ baths, 2-car garage, $87,500. Mortgage 9.25%, $576.80 monthly. I remember signing the mortgage papers and being jolted to see the date 2008. I’d only ever seen dates like that in science fiction novels about the far distant future.

In 1985 when our second child was born, we sold that house for $170,000 and moved across the bay to the Berkeley Hills. Three bedrooms, 2 baths on the main level, with a downstairs suite for my office with separate full bath, 2-car garage, $235,000. This one was a variable-rate mortgage, so the rates and payments fluctuated; the initial rate was 8% (about $1380 a month), but it went up and down over the life of the loan. One year the monthly payment rose almost $200. And yes, as a freelance contract technical writer, there were years when work was scarce and we had trouble making the monthly, but we never missed a payment.

Our kids grew up and moved out, and I eventually retired and gratefully stepped off the treadmill. In 2020 we sold the place after 35 years, gave away half our stuff, said goodbye to my beloved Japanese maple, and moved across country to be near the grandchildren, to a two-bedroom condominium apartment in Bethesda, Maryland (suburban Washington, D.C.). As you may have heard, the real estate market in the San Francisco Bay Area has gone completely insane; the house in Berkeley sold for $1.6 million. As a result, we were able to purchase the apartment in which I’m now sitting for all cash, mortgage-free, $570,000. The remaining million will support us in our declining years and eventually pass to the children and grandchildren. I am as shocked at the word “million” now as I was back then at the date 2008.