The author took a simple price-to-income ratio and gave it a nice spin. Search for property price index.
The US housing prices shows pretty good affordability compared to where I live now.
How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
91–100 of 350 posts
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
how many years will it take to pay off your mortgage? thats done for you, about 15 or 30. how does other factors like food/transportation/taxes factor in? though not always, but they tend to go hand in hand no? the cost of real estate is factored into much of what we buy / spend money.
It is honestly worth your while to pay off your mortgage as soon as humanly possible.
Not necessarily – interest rates are exceptionally low in places. My own mortgage is around the 1% mark – it's more efficient to invest the money that would otherwise be used to pay it off.
(That's not to say that there are no other reasons to pay off the mortgage – owning a home outright is a great security to have.)
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#93Fantastic storytelling! Great job. @sndean I also have to wonder how many years home ownership is taking off my life expectancy, due to the stress of trying to maintain the house and associated payments!?!
The real trick is to learn to enjoy it, like with cooking and car repair and cleaning.
Also helps to be on top of things, poking around periodically to see things are working as they should. You find yourself with fewer catastrophic failures on a dark blustery night that way.
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments. You have maintenance. And if something bad happens with the foundation, that's very expensive to fix. Unless you just plan to die and have the house demolished and the property sold (which is honestly preferable in some cases of inheritance). I had to pay $25k to have supports installed in the crawlspace and other mitigation to avoid foundation work. I migh…
(Full disclosure: Bay Area homeowner here) I can stomach the idea of renting for the rest of my working life. My renting life was good, had more cash to spare, good landlords, etc. What terrifies me is the idea that I'd have to keep paying rent when I retire.
True but when you retire, you're not bound to a job and you can live in a cheaper place.
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#95This is really cool. Can anyone guess which frameworks power this article? I'd love to try to put together something similar. I wonder if the code is on github somewhere?
I see that you use python and hence I recommend Folium (https://github.com/python-visualization/folium). For example I made this (http://abhirag.in/articles/train_of_thought_1.html) using it and though it's not this cool, it's a start I suppose :) Also Idyll (https://idyll-lang.github.io/) might be of interest.
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
And of course the NYTimes calculator also factors in home prices appreciation. This is not really academic; it's fairly important. In cheaper housing markets with limited growth, it might be cheaper to rent because the expected cost of a major repair (and return on that investment) are both so low. Of course, you can't ever recognize the value of your house unless you sell it and move somewhere cheaper (or buy a 2nd…
I think this highlights how expensive living is and how little income is. If we're going to have a "free economy" without an end of life safety net (i.e. Social security) then it has to be possible to work a lifetime and retire on savings made. But most indicators show little to no saving for most people. It sure seems something is deeply wrong.
Many people simply spend what they make and live paycheck to paycheck, even when they make quite good money.
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#97I liked the visualization and data, but I don't think it makes sense to compare home prices to wages w/o considering alternatives to home ownership. Home prices don't exit in a vacuum. That is, if a home is 10x the median salary, you can't really say "well, if I didn't buy a home I could work 10 years less." That's because the alternative to buying is renting, which is also expensive. So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k…
You also have to factor in the opportunity cost of what you could've done with that down payment (e.g. What would a $100k downpayment invested for 30 years in the stock market be worth vs how much is that worth in your home in 30 years?) The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make some of these decisions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
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Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#98This is really cool. Can anyone guess which frameworks power this article? I'd love to try to put together something similar. I wonder if the code is on github somewhere?
Ha. It's powered by ArcGIS, the Oracle of the mapping world, meaning it's all proprietary, locked down and expensive. If you want freer alternatives, check out CartoDB, Mapbox and QGIS.
Except for the fact that you can sign up for ArcGIS Online as an individual for free and all of the application templates (in addition to tons of other Esri projects) are up on github.
e.g. https://github.com/Esri/storymap-cascade
Almost everything they release is under the Apache license.
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
And of course the NYTimes calculator also factors in home prices appreciation. This is not really academic; it's fairly important. In cheaper housing markets with limited growth, it might be cheaper to rent because the expected cost of a major repair (and return on that investment) are both so low. Of course, you can't ever recognize the value of your house unless you sell it and move somewhere cheaper (or buy a 2nd…
I think this highlights how expensive living is and how little income is. If we're going to have a "free economy" without an end of life safety net (i.e. Social security) then it has to be possible to work a lifetime and retire on savings made. But most indicators show little to no saving for most people. It sure seems something is deeply wrong.
I think you are having the wrong mindset. A stronger social net would not solve this problem of relative cost of housing. Already, there are many many homes that are very affordable for the median income.
Re: How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reverse mortgages are an option too, especially around retirement. I didn't do too much research and I'm sure on paper it's a scam, but with no kids and no one to really give the house to beyond charity when my wife and I kick the bucket, I am considering making my place part of my retirement plan. Or just sell it to pay rent for the rest of your life. Either way it's a pretty big boon.
Not really. End of life care can drag on and is expensive. Even if you're really lucky and net $1 million from your house a single illness could wipe that out quickly. Retirement homes cost much more than comparable rent/mortgages.
Those things can be mitigated with some smart financial planning. You can take your lump sum and buy an annuity and use those annuity payments for health and long term care insurance. I would also add long term care insurance is doubly important for the grandparent commenter who doesn't have children who could help care or support them if something goes wrong.