You gotta keep in mind that not a lot of people have opportunities like that. You seem to have hit a rare sweet spot of decent job within a low COL area and an ability to save enough money to buy a home straight up. That's just not the case for the vast majority of people. Pittsburgh, for example, has that absurdly low COL for a city and the housing market really hasn't exploded there either. Or at least not for areas outside of the immediate suburbs.