<prompt> Human: Long-time lurker here. So looking at home prices in the Los Angeles market, it seems the prices are back to pre-recession levels. It also seems very expensive to buy a home today and in retrospect, 2010-2011 was a good time as that seems to have been the lowest low. It took many years to recover and I imagine that prices cant just keep going up and will eventually flatten out. Right? But will it just flatten out or will it burst like it did? I am concerned that if I buy now, that I will not only pay a lot more, but that it would also be a bad buy because the bubble could burst tomorrow and the value of the home could be 50-75 of what one would pay today.Is it better to just wait it out for a few more years and know for sure its flattened, or does flattening eventually just lead to a bubble bursting? Is there some way to make an informed decision?  <response>: The best time to buy is when everybody else is selling. That means you have to wait until the next bubble is well into bursting. You have to have a great deal of cash exactly when that happens given that banks will be hesitant to loan during bubbles that are bursting. You dont want to have to sell ANYTHING during a bubble bursting process in order to get the cash you need. It needs to be in cash all the time.Its really kinda hard to pull that all off right.What you do want to do is just lean heavily on the conservative side. You want the cheapest house in the neighborhood. Prices rising all around you will cause your stuff to go up more than your neighbors stuff will.The thing is, if a bubble bursts, you dont REALLY have to worry very much about that if you already have your house.Say the house costs a mil and you buy it for that and next month its worth 900k. That doesnt REALLY need to be a large concern for you. The house is exactly like it was when you bought it. That by itself isnt a good reason to pack everything up and mail your keys to the bank.Its not great, but you can just not care and get along just the same as you would have if the market value never went down. The only time the market value of your house matters is when you want to sell it and thats it. If you arent selling it there is no difference between it being worth 1 or 1 mil. It would be better for you if it was 1 because you would pay less in property tax. 