The crash of 2008 is just 15 years ago. You could hardly give away properties in my neighborhood - there were multiple sales for less than the cost of my car. Those exact conditions may not recur, but speculators always, always overextend. The 15 years of continuous gains we’ve experienced since 2008 are historically unprecedented, so one might even guess that we’re due for a major correction. Maybe it won’t be for another 10 years, but there will definitely be a major housing crash “in our lifetime.” Unless, maybe, you’re already 80 years old.
Taxing property doesn’t really work, because landlords just pass those taxes on to their tenants. Even if you make a big differential between owner-occupied and rental property (and homestead exemptions are already common), there’s a huge base of people who are either short-term residents or lack down payment, and will rent regardless of how much of the landlord’s taxes they have to pay. You can make specific neighborhoods or communities unappealing to landlords, but that just makes them move across the street.
One of the things that makes rental property attractive is the massive leverage available to speculators. You can easily get 5:1 leverage on a property - i.e., you get the profits on a million dollar investment for just $200k cash. Interest on the loan is low, because it’s backed the the property, and that interest is tax deductible, and there’s many ways to disguise profits or offset them with management expenses. Maybe there’s things you can do in the income tax code to discourage property rental, but it’s not going to be taxing the property directly.
Also consider a toaster oven. They come in sizes up to 12" or so, definitely big enough for 9x11 pans, and the small chamber means they heat up super fast. I have a gas range, but I keep an induction hotplate on top of one burner and a toaster oven, with convection, in the next room for smaller jobs. Keeps the CO2 and the heat down in the summer.
I used to pack a lunch - nothing fancy, just a couple of sandwiches, & maybe fruit - then cook dinner, all for around $100/week. Started treating myself to bought lunches. Again nothing fancy, mostly fast-casual type places where you order at the counter & they bring your food to the table. Water not soda. Restaurant lunches are cheaper than restaurant dinners, but they’re also way more calories than my packed lunches, and I found I wasn’t in the mood for big dinners anymore. In the end, I was still spending around $100/week, eating out 5 days/week, and just having a snack in the evening.
When I was younger, I did more individual stocks and many different funds/etfs. Felt great when one did well, and I still hold some that have 10x gains. Some of those 10x gains were a decade ago, and have been pretty flat since then, but they’re still 10-baggers. I, too, tended not to put more into those big gainers, partly because they now seem expensive, partly because investing more would reduce my total percentage gains. When I was young and your portfolio was small, those individual wins had a big impact on the portfolio and it felt important to get the best possible immediate performance.
Over the years, though, the differences between funds average out. Gains over a year or two become a small fraction of the gains over a decade. I can see that some of my winners are only winners because I happened to buy them during a recession, like anything bought during the Covid panic. It’s become easier to dismiss the effect of stock/fund picking, and I’ve consolidated most of those funds into the stereotypical broad market indexes. Focussed ETFs, like LIT or QCLN, are safe from incompetence or fraud in individual company leadership, but the next administration can kill whole sectors with a change in tax or regulatory policy.