Home is not the same thing as a house. Owning an apartment is way better than renting.
The real cost of owning a home
751–760 of 901 posts
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the landlord obligated to renew the lease at the end in perpetuity? Or does the landlord just need to wait for the lease to expire and then choose to not renew?
in germany by law every lease for private homes is always in perpetuity. the concept of renewal does not even exist. it is always month to month until the tenant decides to move out. you can't not renew a lease. you can raise the rent, but only in small steps. exceptions are if the tenant fails to pay for a few months, damages the property or misbehaves in other ways.
That sounds like a really awful law, TBH. I would never rent to someone if it meant that I was powerless to decide to end the relationship. I'm all for protecting tenants to some extent, but that law strikes me as abusive of the landowner.
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#753Beyond financial costs, I was caught off guard at how much time home ownership took up. House maintenance and projects have taken up most of every single weekend of mine for the past few years. Part of it is simply that I bought a house with more space than the places I usually rented. More to clean, more to maintain, more things that can go wrong, etc. But the biggest thing is that I'm the only one in charge of main…
>>Home ownership is definitely a lifestyle choice first and foremost more than a financial one.
Same could be said about Real estate investments.
I know people who look up real estate investors as an inspiration as something they want to do themselves. One day trip scouting for properties, is enough to make them quit when they realise most of it is lots of irritating driving, due diligence, legal work, loans etc.
Hard things have little competition for a reason, process is a high attrition journey.
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#754Home ownership is a 30-year bet that you will have continued income to sustain the lifestyle[1] . It is extremely unlikely anyone will have a 30 year home run, without job loss, divorce, bad health and any number of life events. Most people would be considered super lucky to have a decade of good run. On the other side of the bet are the financial institutions, which will get continued income (as long as you pay) and…
To further understand how banks win, the interest is front loaded. Proponents of home ownership always point to low interest rate for 30 year mortgage. However, with front loaded interest, the majority of payment goes towards interest payment and not building equity in the first 7 - 10 years.
For a $400,000 mortgage at 6.4%, after 7 years, you'd have paid over $210,000. However, the equity built is only $38,942. The other $171,226 went entirely to the bank.
The average homeowner stays in their home for only 7 to 10 years before selling or refinancing. Which means very little equity building, mostly interest payments.
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#755Beyond financial costs, I was caught off guard at how much time home ownership took up. House maintenance and projects have taken up most of every single weekend of mine for the past few years. Part of it is simply that I bought a house with more space than the places I usually rented. More to clean, more to maintain, more things that can go wrong, etc. But the biggest thing is that I'm the only one in charge of main…
Condo is suppose to be that nice hybrid but they became enshittified long ago and have routinely proven to be bad deals for the average buyer in too many circumstances. The US doesn’t understand how to make the housing market functional. I’d love to have a condo where a great many things are handled by the association but the math never maths, as they say, and a great deal of the issues is because condo associations…
> The US doesn’t understand how to make the housing market functional.
I'd say the US understands how to make the housing market functional, but there are more-powerful interests pushing the market in other directions - financialization, extraction, NIMBYism, social exclusion, ...
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#756Live in something thats not massive, old & high maintenance. Live small, minimal & not reliant on a system designed to steal from you. https://youtu.be/rY9q9rbgUsA?si=jbDLtZvVu1rm0daQ
I mean the video was interesting but the guy literally explains how wind ripped its entire roof off in the middle of the night during a storm.
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have 2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill, so it's more like a full acre equivalent of flat ground (except drastically more of a pain). Pulling weeds up several hundred feet of steep hillside that grow back constantly is a punishment worthy of Sisyphus. It hadn't been done for about 5 years when we moved in, so one of the neighbors spent 200 hours cleaning it up for us. Not joking, 200 hours of labo…
Why not get rid of most of the grass (especially on the hill) and put in a perennial garden of hardy (for your zone) shrubs and trees?
> Why not get rid of...
Soil erosion.
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#758Where you die matters. A $30M estate left to children in WA owes $5M in state estate tax. Move to one of 34 states and that drops to zero, and in 8 of them state income and capital gains tax disappear too. The hard part is cutting that tax bill while landing somewhere you'd actually enjoy living: who your neighbors are, how educated and affluent they are, how they vote. This tool lets you optimize all of it across 8,000+ U.S. suburbs, towns, and cities at once: https://where-move.vercel.app
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eagh, the leverage really isn't that cheap, and you can think of renting as giving you cheap leverage too (it's just your borrowing the house instead of the money).
The leverage only matters in an appreciation market (which we’ve been spoiled with in the USA since boomertimes). If you distill the math on assumed zero appreciation (or zero “real” appreciation) it becomes not so terribly pretty. It’s really a form of various hedges wrapped up with a bow, that for many people is desirable (and since we HAVE had appreciation it doesn’t “turn out bad” most of the time anyway). Anyone…
Renting also has hedges embedded, and every hedge can be a risk position.
In particular the interest rate options in foxed mortgages are pretty expensive and it only hedges the cost of a particular house not housing in general.
Housing cost is correlated with local incomes so in some ways it's doubling down. In particular recessions are deflationary in the immediate aftermath.
Re: The real cost of owning a home
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you treat your house like a rental that you rent to yourself, you can avoid a bunch of headaches - mainly because you’ve given yourself “permission” to spend on it.
wait ... There are landlords out there who will "spend on it"? Mine took 3 weeks to replace a broken HVAC when it was 35 degress out. 5 days to fix a toilet that when flushed dumped sewage into my downstairs neighbors ceiling. Maybe if you're treating yourself as a tenant but your run of the mill rent extracting (or worse, middle man) landlord is the cheapest creature on the land.
Don't know about your landlord specifically, and I'm no landlord, but there's also a bunch of people (including homeowners) that will wait until summer starts to test and then complain about HVAC... just on peak season for HVAC maintenance, where the waiting times are long (and the price will probably be higher).