161–170 of 350 posts
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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.
The data was very interesting, but there wasn't anything meaningful mentioned that came out of the data, other than possibly where you should look to move to if you have flexibility. I personally bought a house in my early twenties. At the time it was roughly 2.5x my income. I've been there a few years and went through some changes to my employment, I now earn more making it easier. Over the course of ownership, in t…
>A house at $250k at a 3.5% interest rate would cost you $72k in interest on a 15-year mortgage or $154k in interest on a 30-year mortgage. At that point, it is worth sending additional payments (especially early on in the mortgage) to save on interest. I would argue that it's not necessarily a smart idea to pay extra just to avoid interest. $154k looks like a lot, and it is, but it's still just paying interest at 3.…
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> But I suppose if your call center employees simply must be living in downtown S.F. the answer must be that we just need lax zoning and higher density! The call center employees living en masse in SF is a very far fetched claim that requires strong evidence here, along with the implication that they are what necessitates higher density. This framing is insensitive to both call center workers who likely could never a…
Hmm... I never said anything about "en masse". It was a reference to the Yelp/Eat24 call center employee controversy from last year. [1] In cases like these, I think it's very reasonable to question why those kinds of jobs should be the ones increasing demand in SF and, therefore, driving up prices for everyone else. If you think my framing is insensitive to call center employees, I think you may have misunderstood m…
Not sure where you get the idea that it should be redesigned, but I do think that incremental [1] upzoning in places where demand exceeds supply of housing (in SF and beyond) makes a great deal of sense.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/12/16/incremental-d...
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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...
The real opportunity cost is not living somewhere else. Run the math and SF is best avoided.
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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.
There are most certainly many things deeply wrong. Most people have negative savings every year. They have more debt. If one has bought a house, then it is very easy to go into more debt every year, when house prices are rising. Then they fall. Since the beginning of written history (the first written records are records of debts) there are stories and parables about the evil of debt and the need for debt jubilees. A…
For example, businesses often need to borrow money in order to get started.
For another, "bridge" loans and "revolving lines of credit" allow a business to operate when the timing of receiving payments does not line up with the timing of when bills are due.
Forgiving debts means that interest rates must rise to cover those losses.
You guys may have this or that problem in the US, but the fact that you have people like this author who put so much effort into communicating the problems and who care this much, that makes me envious of you all. You'd be really hard pressed to find a good number of people in my country who cared as much about the welfare of the rest of the people.
Sorry to hear that, just out of interest which country are you speaking about?
I 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…
He mentions a county in Texas as the most affordable — and yet Texas has relatively high property taxes (higher than California). So there's that. And the more expensive homes will also be an income tap when you retire and sell the house (hint: anyone in the magenta can retire, sell and live out their lives anywhere in the green).
I always wonder why it is an unknown fact for many that in Texas houses are still very affordable, even in metropolitan areas. I follow the market there closely, and you can get quality homes for the cheap. Is it that the high property taxes work their magic in that they hold the upfront purchase price low? It would have pros and cons - while keeping your house when retired gets more difficult, buying one when still…
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That's funny, my takeaway was that the vast majority of the US has incredibly affordable housing. But I suppose if your call center employees simply must be living in downtown S.F. the answer must be that we just need lax zoning and higher density!
You clearly don't know what it's like to live on minimum wage right now. It's extremely difficult to live anywhere even close to the Bay area on minimum wage, which let's be real, a call center employee would be on. Public transportation options get figured in there too. I'm very fortunate to have a good job now, but it wasn't all that long ago I was scraping by on near minimum wage.