191–200 of 318 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a renter I don't pay property tax, but I do pay maintancene, insurance, utility bills and whatever else can easily attached to the monthly bill. The rest is baked into the cost.
It is baked into the cost and you know it up front. That's the ceiling I am talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you rent you're left with nothing. Well, no. You're left with the cash you would've spent buying a house. Whether that's financially better or worse, depends entirely on the mortgage interest, taxes, and maintenance costs of the house, as well as the money you could have earned investing the cash elsewhere, compared to the rent you would have spent over the same time period.
When renting a 1br costs as much as my mortgage on a 3br, I don't think that really tracks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something I've noticed is that some cities are better for renters, and others are better for buyers. My current city in central Europe is very renter-friendly. A nice apartment would cost $600k, but rents practically never exceed $1500/month. Under such circumstances an apartment doesn't seem like a great investment. I've also lived, briefly, in Canada -- where rents were often extremely high relative to home prices.…
I saw this when I lived in the Chicagoland area. A co-worker was giving me the business for renting instead of buying something. The he let it slip that his property tax alone was $35k/year, almost 2x what I was paying in rent, and that didn’t even include the mortgage.
I don't doubt you or your friend, but their situation was unique.
The prevalence of luxury apartments flies in the face of the overbuying section. People overbuy on apartments as well. Every time I see someone arguing about minimum wage, their benchmark seems to be having a 2 bedroom apartment, not a studio or even a 1 bedroom. I find this wildly unrealistic. Apartments also sell people on amenities that almost no one uses, but justify higher rent prices. These luxury apartments ar…
> The Flexibility of Renting Is Undervalued And the stability of buying is undervalued. It's telling that this article frames housing as an investment vehicle rather than as a basic necessity. And it's not just a necessity because it shelters you from the elements and gives you storage for your stuff; it anchors you in a neighborhood and allows you to begin forming a local community. The flexibility of renting that t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw this when I lived in the Chicagoland area. A co-worker was giving me the business for renting instead of buying something. The he let it slip that his property tax alone was $35k/year, almost 2x what I was paying in rent, and that didn’t even include the mortgage.
That's an enormously high property tax bill for Chicagoland. I live in Oak Park, famously one of the highest-taxed areas in the county, in a relatively large house, and my taxes are not close to that (more than $10k less). I don't doubt you or your friend, but their situation was unique.
That said, he was often trying to show off, so who knows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the stability of buying It depends. Personally, after witnessing both sides of the coin second-hand, I am not leaning in the direction of either buying or renting in absolute. It is highly dependent on the context and circumstances of a specific situation/market. I am aware that this is just an anecdote (i.e., it isn't going to say much about the overall state of things across all states in the US), but there is a…
If you're renting, getting the landlord to deal with an acute issue is pretty clear cut. They usually get it done . It's the slow burn neglect shit that's almost impossible to get fixed. Anecdote of my own: The last place we rented before buying had a minor roof leak. Minor, but still a roof leak. The landlord was old, her daughter was responsible for a lot of stuff, and they were both remote for at least part of the…
There are definitely tons of pros that come from renting from small/individual landlords (e.g., potentially tiny/non-existent monthly rental cost increases over the years; I have an acquaintance who managed to keep the same lease price [which was already extremely low for the neighborhood] for about 3 years now in LES neighborhood of Manhattan).
However, what you described is precisely one of my biggest personal concerns, hence why I tend to stick with larger/property-management-company-run properties+buildings that are, in general, newer. I discovered that it is much easier to get property management companies to get things like that done. In fact, after some of my current neighbors complained enough about elevator outages over the past month (for context: the building is 30 floors tall and has 3 elevators, but we recently had multiple weeks where only one elevator was functional, which led to large elevator lines and slow service), everyone automatically got a $500 credit applied to their next rent payment.
Counterpoint: buying is always better, people just can't afford it. Here where I live the minimum price for rent is monthly mortgage installement, meaning that you'll pay for rent at least as much as you'd pay for mortgage. But after you pay your mortgage you still have an asset in your hand. You can pass it on to your children or you can sell it when you're old, downsize (or even rent) and get some cash for your ret…
Where I live, interest payments alone exceed the rental rate for the same property even if you could afford a 20% downpayment. Those interest payments are a total loss. No amount of contortions can make those numbers pencil out where ownership is beneficial to the buyer. As it happens I now rent but I recently sold my house because it didn't make sense even though my carrying costs were far lower than any new buyer.
By the time you pay off a mortgage, a renter could afford to buy the same property for cash with money left over.
> The Flexibility of Renting Is Undervalued And the stability of buying is undervalued. It's telling that this article frames housing as an investment vehicle rather than as a basic necessity. And it's not just a necessity because it shelters you from the elements and gives you storage for your stuff; it anchors you in a neighborhood and allows you to begin forming a local community. The flexibility of renting that t…
I don't know many homeowners who formed "local communities" with their neighbors. I know a few, but not many. And I know renters who know all their neighbors well. Seems more like a personality trait than something enabled by owning where you live.