History has a habit of making fools of all economists. If you were to go back through newspapers from a number of years ago and read any of the predictions by economists about interest rates, you'll find that most of them finished up looking reasonably foolish in the longer term and extremely foolish in the short-term.

So how do you actually estimate when is a good time to get into the market and what a good rate is? Well, the truth of the matter is that even if you take all of the market indicators into account, there is no actual way of determining beyond any reasonable doubt what way the market is likely to go over a given period of time. Given this situation, probably the single most important thing that you can do is look at it from the perspective of your own personal finances.

Try to map out at best and worst case scenarios in terms of your personal finances and what you can afford. Then compare this to what appears to be happening in the marketplace. Once you've done this and you can reasonably say that you would be able to weather the storm even if your worst-case scenario came to pass then this leaves you in an extremely stable position to enter the market. The truth of the matter is that if you make a mistake and buy a house at the worst possible time and then interest rates also go up, if you have bought well within what you can afford you will still be able to stay in the market, keep your home and ultimately you will come out the winner over the longer term.

This is not to say that you should just completely ignore market and interest-rate trends. You should do everything possible to take them into account but the information must be fed through the mechanism of your own financial situation. The last thing you want to do is get into a scenario where you can only afford to keep the house you have bought if interest rates stay the same and the market works favorably for you. This is not a set of circumstances under which it is a good idea to buy a house.

Therefore, while you should always take interest-rate and market trends into account, the single most important thing that all of your decisions need to be informed by is your personal financial circumstances. So, once you've bought a house that you can afford even if things don't go to your liking you will be able to keep your home and then if circumstances do actually conspire favorably, you have left yourself in the best possible situation but if things go the other direction at least you'll be able to stay in the game and this is the single most important factor over the longer term.

Interest-rate fluctuations and trends are important but they're not as important as making sure that you keep yourself in a financially stable position even when the market doesn't suit you.