The real cost of owning a home • Hacker News Board

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#871

Post by password4321 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:51 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #857

password4321 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently robotic lawnmowers work pretty well these days, though it sounds like only one might not keep up if the lawn needs regular mowing that often.

You can never fully automate lawn work because a big time sink is actually stick pickup ahead of the mowing. Also, every property is loaded with edge cases.

This is true! But apparently the whatever percent that can be automated has crossed the line and become "worth it" for some.

It's also worth noting that owners have changed their behavior to favor their robot vacuums, though I have not read any similar examples for robot lawnmowers yet.

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#872

Post by littlexsparkee » Thu, May 28, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #236

jedberg wrote: post #164

The benefit of owning a home is almost always psychological, not financial. If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place. But the psychological benefits can be huge. You have much greater control over the place you spend most of your time. You can change it to your liking. You don't have to worry about rent increases or ow…

Yes the benefit is psychological but I think there's more to it as well. Firstly within investing, I am assuming that a person has safety net amount of money before properly investing. This is something that I have heard some people don't exactly do. As such, what happens is that, they might lose a job and have to pay rent and might have to sell the stocks or any index fund/investments that they had within the market…

for what it's worth for VTI OAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX combined would comprise 0.3% of the index based on float. I was concerned about this at first but running the numbers it doesn't seem like a big issue risk-wise - I agree it's a worry trend to see changes to policy and don't want retail liquidity to cash out privileged investors. Some type of delay where the stock finds its market value before entering the fund is ideal.

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#873

Post by raydev » Thu, May 28, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

grantith wrote: post #683

raydev wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you keep it from filling up with weeds in any reasonably grass-friendly climate? I just pay someone $50/week to mow my lawn and I pay zero attention to it. If we have a mini-drought and the grass turns brown, oh well.

Kill your lawn and let the native plants take over.

I'd rather not get a bunch of ticks while walking to my door.

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#874

Post by hansvm » Thu, May 28, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

eikenberry wrote: post #852

hansvm wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell when a home was built like that though. Why did you purchase it regardless? Why did you do it again after your first experience?

If professional inspectors cannot tell what makes you think you can? Our first home was inspected by a bank inspector + my wife's father who works in construction and everyone found it OK. We had the second home inspected by 2 separate inspectors and both OK'd the house with only minor issues. All our friends have equally terrible stories. Maybe you just got lucky or haven't owned a home yet?

Most "professionals" in most professions are mediocre, and even when they have potential their incentives are rarely aligned with yours. Bank inspectors don't care about the same things you do, and construction workers don't necessarily have skills which are directly transferable to inspection, at least not without training and practice.

Saying that out loud, yes, inspection is a skill like any other, and it's a bit simplistic for me to say that "obviously that house is good/bad," at least as an intervention I'm recommending to randos I don't know.

But...if I've just gotten lucky then I should buy some lottery tickets. I'm never wrong when I point out the places a house is going to fail or the places where it's going to succeed. My background is a bit off the beaten path (lots of construction, handyman activities, bank demolitions, out-at-sea yacht repair/captaining/maintenance/emergences, electrical installations, whatever -- at least until I finally settled down into a more stable tech career); maybe that helps, or maybe I have some loose wires upstairs. Whatever the case, I don't think it's hard to avoid a bad house if you take the time and care to properly inspect it (and it might take a lot of time, including some disassembly -- big red flag if you can't peek into the internals, and I wouldn't make a multiple hundred thousand dollar investment if you aren't allowed to check on the details).

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#875

Post by ragall » Thu, May 28, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #393

ragall wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What maintenance is there to do exactly ?

Yard work, gutter cleaning, power washing exterior, cleaning windows, bi-annual HVAC service, exterior paint (especially if the house has any wood) and trim upkeep. And as the house ages, you get things like repainting interior rooms, more frequent plumbing issues, major HVAC repairs, roof replacement, repaving driveway, electrical upgrades, remodeling, etc. We downsized to a townhome to avoid some of that (half the…

It never ceases to surprise me how North American homes are just a source of time wasting for the owners. I grew up in Italy and we never had to do any of that (except repainting the rooms once every 20 years with my father).

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#876

Post by skew-aberration » Thu, May 28, 2026, 3:54 AM UTC

lesuorac wrote: post #866

skew-aberration wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe OP is saying when you buy from a landlord, they still get their profit (you pay them the NPV of the expected future rents - it's neutral from their perspective). In cases like your example, what forces landlords to lower the rent? Usually only a) cost of credit, as you said b) opportunity cost, and c) government intervention [land tax, property tax]. a) not all landowners have mortgages! many own outright. they…

> a) not all landowners have mortgages! many own outright. they make pure profit I mean they don't. They have expenses like taxes and maintenance regardless of the properties vacancy. Nominally this is more profit than somebody with additional expenses (mortgage) but not always more than somebody who has additional income from say stock returns (the whole buy-vs-rent argument). While your entire post has been directl…

I'm not really sure what you're trying to add, so here's a few questions and examples of my points. Have you read much economics?

a) Firstly, I said landowners, not home buyers. Are you claiming that nobody owns land without a mortgage? Most land value is in residential real estate these days, but not all of it. Much of that value is owned outright - either by homeowners or investors. This varies regionally but could be about 25-50% of the land. What do you think happens when a mortgage is paid off? What about a mortgage on an investment property? What about all the boomers who paid of their loans 20 years ago? While I did list taxes in my original comment, landowners do not necessarily need to pay significant maintenance, for example in the case of undeveloped land, or the case where the value of the house is very low relative to the value of the land.

b) Yes, market dynamics are frequently misunderstood. Do you deny that it is misunderstood, or are you implying it is misunderstood by me? As a case in point, your own example is actually simplified to the point of being wrong - investors frequently buy land with a loan such that the mortgage payment is greater than the (rental, business, etc) return. They do this on the expectation that future yields will make up for the losses. In most jurisdictions this strategy is actually incentivized by the tax system - money lost on the interest payments can be offset against taxable income from your other assets. Are you claiming this doesn't happen? Likewise, in my city, many commercial properties are unleased, but the asking rent is not reduced to the point that they get tenants. This is a 'feature, not a bug' of market dynamics - a fact which is frequently misunderstood by laypeople.

c) Again, what are you adding here? You are saying that the profits are not realised? This is simply untrue - property investors do realise their profits, typically via rent. Are you saying landownership is not profitable or it is not more profitable than other enterprises?

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#877

Post by skew-aberration » Thu, May 28, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #275

I've come to the conclusion that high housing prices are pretty much the root of most of our problems and is probably the biggest factor in increasing wealth inequality. I came across the housing theory of everything recently [1][2]. Disappearing third spaces, out-of-control inflation. homelessness, etc can all be traced back to housing affordability being the primary factor. I tend to abhor buying vs rent calculator…

You'll likely enjoy the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George. His 'land theory of everything' predicted continued increasing rents, decreasing interest rates, low real wages, continued global population growth, the GFC, analysed the case of superintelligent AI, explained how free trade and immigration without tax reform would lead to backlash from working class, and that communist states would become tyrannical dictatorships - all in 1879.

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#878

Post by duskdozer » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:37 AM UTC

xphos wrote: post #838

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seemingly he can do every trade. He's under the building doing plumbing or electric one day. Landscaping the next. Doing this is basically illegal in modern day. The requirements to get even one trade license, much less more than one, are set up to make it uneconomical unless that trade is your full-time profession. Who can justify doing a multi-year full-time apprenticeship in each trade when they expect to spend…

Honestly the most shocking think i learned when moving to Massachusetts was that only licenced trade people can request to have work done inspected. This was insane to me. Why would towns not want amature work not to be inspected. It wasn't illegal for a homeowner with poor experience to electrical, gas, HVAC, without a inspection... It was wild, I understand know its like this because its basically impossible to get…

Oh, wow. So if you buy a house and find some sketchy looking work later on, would you have to find a pro to even call in an inspection, and would they even do that without getting some commitment to fix it if something's wrong?

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#879

Post by duskdozer » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:42 AM UTC

satiric wrote: post #815

grantith wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kill your lawn and let the native plants take over.

If you kill the lawn, won't the invasive plants take over?

Even if they were going to, you could just seed it with some native, low-growing "groundcover": clovers, fescues, whatever is in your area.

Re: The real cost of owning a home

#880

Post by headroom » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

dividefuel wrote: post #315

Beyond 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…

This is my experience as well. Maintenance of the house and the property is a huge time sink, but the worst offender is the distance to everything and how you need a car. Driving around constantly in suburbia is absolutely maddening. Oh and the car needs maintenance too. Changing tires, service appointments, keeping it clean, shovelling snow so you can get to the store.

We sold the house and moved to an apartment in the city last year. Now I have time to hang out with my family, we have all these restaurants and things to do everywhere. Got rid of the car and I bike to work.

My maintenance now is pretty much:

- Mow collectively owned lawn once per summer

- Spring and autumn cleaning of collectively owned spaces. One or two chores. Last autumn I cleaned a carpet. This spring I cleaned two bathrooms and checked the fire alarm batteries. Then each time we had a barbecue after the chores.

- Service bicycles when needed

- Make sure food isn't rotting in the fridge

Oh and I have time for hobbies too. My kids have way more friends now (playgrounds are really spread out in the suburbs and they are mostly empty) and the area we moved to is a lot calmer than in the suburbs where teenagers would roam around and be loud because there was nothing else to do.

We might get something like a summer home to be close to nature when it's nice to be (currently we rent a cabin for a few weeks in the summer) but just everyday living is so much better in an urban environment.

For context we live in Europe.