I’m a little confused as to how to use this rule of thumb when you don’t know when your next sample is going to appear. For example, I was looking to buy a hou

I’m a little confused as to how to use this rule of thumb when you don’t know when your next sample is going to appear. For example, I was looking to buy a house a few months ago. It was a pretty competitive market with really low supply (1 home a week), and I had to wait for my spouse job location to finalize to start making offers. Even though I spent the months leading up to it looking at homes to get an idea of what we wanted, we couldn’t actually bid. When we did start making offers, we didn’t have much options but to make an offer on almost every home that came up on our search criteria, eventually ended up in a place lower than our budget because that was what was being sold at that time. If we had waited it would have been worse, interest rates shot up a full percentage point a week after I locked in my rate (got an offer accepted).