Sounds like you had those within grasp.
I made too many assumptions while reading your post and projected myself. While living in the Bay Area I passed up lots of RE due to high capital requirements and insufficient rents to cover interest. And I had too many friends pointing out the car window saying “I could have bought that for...,” when in reality they were maxed out on the house they lived in.
In your cases I would actually give things a second thought. Mostly I like to think about what led me down the path away from the payout. That way I can try to see if I have some built in mental blocks that will just keep letting them slip by. Like when you’re fishing and you lose fish while landing you might want to check the condition of the barb.
In 2000 at about 30yo I would lie on my bed dreaming about how I shoulud’ve put $30k into this dot com or that dot com stock and sold it to have my first million. I’d do this and just calculate the fantasy gains out while saying “if I bought it here, then sold it here I’d...”. It was pathetic. I was lying on a cheap futon bed in a basement I rented cheap. I had ants and rats as roommates.
I’d wonder how I’d get outta there.
Somehow I outgrew that mindset. I had a lot of buddies playing the same game. One told me “if I just had bought JDS Uniphase” or another said “please God give us another dot com this time we won’t piss it away.” It was totally unproductive behavior. The guys who said that are financially messed up now. Fifty somethings working in Silicon Valley tech and totally reliant on salary. Geezers at hiding at Cisco, HP and Intel. Burned in the dot com, indebted in the 2006 real estate bubble.
I look back on those days and just laugh. What a waste of time. Glad it only consumed a few Saturday mornings.
Yes, it took a lot longer to make that million but I wasn’t making too much progress back then dreaming of 20/20 hindsight.
Sitting around dreaming and regretting wasted more than time, it wasted opportunity. Don’t indulge yourself too long in self pity.
