by buying a house you get to be a wage slave for a couple dozen years, By renting you can be a wage slave for your whole life
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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By renting a home, you'll pay 1300 a month for the rest of your life.
By buying a home, you'll pay 800 dollars a month for the rest of your life, with the occasional 5 - 10 thousand dollars surprises every now and again.
Except in the end you can also sell that house for $600k-$900k+ at 65 years old then use half of that to rent the next 30 years and have the rest to do whatever the fuck you want.
And rent goes up. In 10 years, the mortgage will be the same.
Not true, unfortunately. Insurance and property taxes go up and payment on those is typically held in escrow with your mortgage. If you're unfortunate enough to live in a state with a clown taint for a governor, like say Ron DeSantis, your mortgage payment could, for example, go up by $600/month this year. Ask me how I know.
Insurance and property taxes aren't part of the mortgage outside of an escrow account, so yes, it is true.
Regardless, the point is still that rents will increase a lot more than monthly overhead for owning.
Florida has a really great Homestead though, capping your property tax increases to 3% per year. For the insurance, you can probably get Citizens, which isn't great but it's something.
So long as the government continues to exercise control over supply to ensure that your investment goes up. There are places like Japan where the value of your home decreases over time because they build new housing when its needed.
It's cute that you think life is inexpensive once you pay off your mortgage at 65 and have spent several thousand dollars throughout the years maintaining that house that would've otherwise been put into your savings account
If it weren't more profitable to own a house than it were to rent, there wouldn't be such a thing as landlords.
No one said it wasn't. It's just that people think it's easier and more profitable than it often is. also people for some reason are okay with giving a bank an absurd amount of money just because they think it's a better deal. And no I don't have to like giving money to a landlord to make this observation
It definitely is a better deal though, if you can scrape up the sum.
You rent for 20 years, all the money you've spent over those 240 months is gone forever. That wealth has been transferred from you to another entity. It's not yours anymore in any way shape or form.
You buy a house, your wealth just changes shape. Money in your bank account becomes real estate with your name on the papers. You still have your wealth, for the most part. Sure you'll lose some on the maintenance and the mortgage and whatnot, but long term it's not even in the same ballpark of 240 months of rent.
Not a difficult decision to make, if, again, you are in a position to make it in the first place.
Have you read my other comments? I don't really need an explanation of how home ownership works. I owned a home for a decade. I lost money. I'm not saying that always happens, just that there are several factors not considered by many people who want to be a homeowner. Yes, it's practically always less expensive, but it's also often stressful.
You rent for 20 years, all the money you’ve spent over those 240 months is gone forever.
... we pay for things we'd rather not deal with all the time. No, it's not money pissed into the wind, I got something for it. Peace of mind for those 20 years. Sleeping in instead of mowing the grass or taking the mower to a mechanic so I can do that.
I have enough stress to deal with without maintaining a property. I may decide to make that trade off again some day, but it's absolutely not this cut and dried thing where renting is stupid if you can own. There are a lot of tradeoffs involved in owning vs renting.
In the short term, renting isn't always stupid if you can own, but most of the time it is. In the long term, renting is, with very rare exceptions, much worse than buying. For context, even those who bought in 2005 at the peak of the last housing bubble on a fixed 30y are saving a fuckton by owning rather than renting. They would be paying 3-4x more renting than owning today.
Over time the mortgage payment is less expensive than it was at first, due to inflation. My rent is 3x more than my neighbor's mortgage because they bought their house 15 years ago.
It's less about that the money gets spent and more about the outcome. The money is burned either way, but now maybe my kids will have it easier and can save their money. Maybe we can start to build more generational wealth, and their kids can have even better lives.
That's the idea we are sold, yes
Man, what the heck happened that made you so bitter about home ownership? I know it can be a pain at times, but it's one of the simplest and most reliable ways we have to build wealth and escape being wage slaves.
Why can't I criticize the very real issues about something without being against it entirely? I'm not...
I wish someone had properly warned me before I bought a house
It's not the criticism. It's the condescension and bitterness. Your case is an outlier; an anecdote, yet you're talking about it like it's the norm when the data shows it is not. So I asked what your story is, because that's the important part. What happened? What lesson can people learn from your situation that might help them avoid it themselves?
What is not an outlier, happens probably 90% of the time, is when a young person hastily buys a house it is a lot more to deal with and more expensive than they think it will be.
It's the condescension and bitterness.
Most of the haters here seem pretty condescending and bitter to me, that's not what I'm trying to be. But then again, I probably wasted 500 hours of my life and $150,000 unnecessarily, which could've been avoided if I had just been more careful. Literally no one cautioned me, everyone pretty much encouraged me every step of the way. So yeah I guess I'm bitter, and that comes out when a bunch of strangers tell me I am an idiot who loves renting and hates owning because I dare to dissent
A lot of you are filling in all the gaps with shit you made up.
What happened was I set an arbitrarily low price for a house and stuck to it. The result is that I bought an old house that was pretty blah. Ended up spending a lot on it, and 5 years later when I decided to move it was a huge burden. No one wanted to pay a cent more than I had paid and I had to rent it. Had one good tenant and one super shitty tenant. It was a huge hassle. I lost money, even compared to if I had just rented those years.
Because I thought like a lot of you here (renting is ALWAYS bad), I fucked up. I should have been more careful.
What you are willing to write off as an outlier that never happens probably happens every single day. Buying a house is not magic. They are a lot of work. They can be very expensive.
Thanks for the explanation and context. Your opinion makes more sense now.
What do you want then? To have nothing? For your children to struggle like we do? I want mine to have a leg up, any advantage I can give them.
I'm going to save my money until the time is truly right, vs hurrying to buy because "anything is better than renting"
Also, I will definitely not be having any children
I'm a wage slave and I can't even afford a house 👍
Either way, you end up slaving away for someone else's profit. Either a landlord or a bank.
That's supposed to be an either thing?
Supposed to be, no. Turned out to be, yes.
I think they were implying that it turned out to be both rather than either.
Ahhhh, gotcha
Eh, owning land is the closest thing a regular person can have to a real investment. I bought a shitty house back in 2019 and sold it recently without having made any improvements to it at all, yet it sold for enough money to offset all of the mortgage payments I'd made since purchasing it. Sure, all it did was make me break even on housing, rather than actually profiting from it, but that's a hell of a lot better than 4 years of $1,000+ rent payments a month down the drain. I'd likely have made a decent profit if I'd done anything to fix it up.
I used the money from the sale to buy an actually decent house in a better neighborhood that I'd never have been able to afford back in 2019, even though my financial situation has stayed pretty much the same. And this house will likely sell for an actual profit in a few years if I decide to move again, while being a great place to live in the meantime to boot.
I accept that I will not benefit from this. But my son will. Even if he sells it once I'm gone and helps him elsewhere. Just got to not fail as a parent and teach him not to spend it on ethots!
Until you get laid off in corporate downsizing to increase profits by .5% and then you can't afford your mortgage and the bank seizes your house
This is what an emergency fund is for. And you would also end up homeless if you're renting and lose your income. It's no better. At least with the house, you could sell it if you need the money. You'll just lose a bit, but not everything.
But actually a lot of businesses do the same, so there's now a lot of middle size repossessed houses on the market and no-one that can buy them. So they auction it, and another corporation buys it up for their rental portfolio at half the price you paid. So now the bank comes after you for the rest of the money, for the rest of your life.
But you can feel happy that the banks didn't lose, and the corporations won!
Based
You're a wage slave regardless unless you're rich or lucky: Gotta have money to eat, get healthcare, have shelter, etc
Rich get richer. Had some recent inheritance roll to an IRA, looking at mutual funds to put it into until I'm required to withdraw it. There are ones tracking at 30-45% returns month after month while the economy is in the shitter. Want in? Minimum purchase amount for those funds is $100,000-250,000. The funds normal people can afford pull down more like 15% RoR on aggressive investments, which are super volatile.
You have to be wealthy to get wealthy. 99% of us are getting fucked by the 0.1% - the 1% just happen to have enough money to get into the lower levels of the game, but the 0.1% have investment options we'll never be party to.
It's amazing how many people will simp for these billionaires like Musk, and claim they're "in the game" with their investments and net worth. They're not. If your net worth is less than mid eight figures, you're not in the game, you're a rounding error.
Leaving us only one real option here government.
Fuck the economy, buy a condo!
I can’t even afford a van down by the river.
Well, if it was burnt and scrap metal, I can afford it.
Don't you need a large down payment?
what if you tried squatting some properties instead?
That is an option some places! It does require that the area/country you live/choose does not viciously prosecute squatters. #USAproblems Wiki link
Oh no! Homeless people are sheltering in unoccupied real estate without going to prison! They should just die outside to protect the investors who rely on homelessness to maintain property values!