11–20 of 350 posts
Is it really necessary to own a home if your mortgage is going to be 20 years long? I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
Scrolling gets really messy on mobile but otherwise a neat way to show the visualizations. Still can't be assed to read it fully though with my scroll being screwed by intermediate textboxes though.
It may be that the author of this article on housing developed the analysis, maps, and text but not the actual web UI. That might be something provided by Esri that is common to all of these "story maps".
Cool visualization, but kind of a useless statistic. The question that matters is: How many years will it take me to pay off my mortgage after my expenses (food, transportation, housing maintenance, utilities, taxes) are taken into account? It doesn't matter how cheap a house is if you can't save any money.
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.
Is it really necessary to own a home if your mortgage is going to be 20 years long? I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
The ability to repaint and punch holes in your walls. Having a lawn and some privacy from the neighbors. Not everyone is nomadic.
Is it really necessary to own a home if your mortgage is going to be 20 years long? I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
The ability to repaint and punch holes in your walls. Having a lawn and some privacy from the neighbors. Not everyone is nomadic.
Is it really necessary to own a home if your mortgage is going to be 20 years long? I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
Do you want to redecorate to your own taste?
Can you even find anywhere to rent? Not everywhere has a liquid rental market.
Moving only once every 10 years sounds great. Renting means maybe having to move on notice as short as one month. Back when I was renting I moved about every 3 years, although that was also house-sharing with other young professionals.
Rent is usually more expensive than mortgage payments, and house price appreciation is your only chance to make a leveraged investment that pays roughly 7% annually.
Edit: also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments. Frees up a whole lot of cashflow. Would you really want to go into retirement on a fixed income with a variable rent payment?
Note that a "20 year mortgage" just sets the amortisation rate of the payments; you can accelerate it, and usually will end up re-mortgaging every 3-5 years to get better rates.
Is it really necessary to own a home if your mortgage is going to be 20 years long? I get that renting is like throwing money in a hole, but people are so much more nomadic these days. What's the big deal in moving once every 10 years once rent gets unbearable?
I think what the alternative title to this blog post could be is: "How many years of life does that city cost?" What it's really comparing is the relative cost of having a roof over your head in different areas. Would you rather work 40 years and live in SF or work 30 years and live in rural Wisconsin? (I don't have an opinion on those two options. I'm sure there are many people in both of those places that are happy with their choices.)
That was a really nice overview. One thing to consider though, when you gain more expertise through experience, you typically gain more income. Of course, most of the time, homes tend to appreciate as well. But to the point, it's best not to burden yourself too much with a home. I bought mine in my late 20s. My criteria was that I didn't ever want to move again (and could fit a pool table), so I bought a house big en…
> bought a house big enough for a family to live comfortably that I could reasonably afford in my late 20s. Well, we'd all love to do that, but where? (That was a rhetorical question, I personally moved to Edinburgh and bought an affordable family house in my late 30s) I remember a website tracking London affordability that pointed out that in some years price appreciation made it literally impossible to save for a h…
Imagine a $1MM house, with a $200K minimum deposit, $135K of household income. If that house goes up by 5% per year ($50K, $10K deposit), your income never goes up, and you save 8% or more of your income towards a down payment, you are still making headway towards the down payment. If you save 15-20% of your income, you are making substantial progress towards the down payment.
Scale the numbers up/down as you wish to fit your particular area/situation, but if the house is affordable by traditional mortgage underwriting requirements, it seems like it's possible to save for the downpayment in scenarios that I explored.
I wonder if the code is on github somewhere?