It definitly depends on the market. Here. I am paying $840/month for a 1000 square foot two bedroom apartment. In two weeks we close on a three bedroom, 1700 square foot home. With 10% down, my house payments are going to be $620/month. Add PMI (ugh), property taxes, and homeowner’s insurance (both very high in Texas), and it goes up to about $1000/month. Considering that my rent is going up to $875 in the fall, it just make sense to move. Not to mention that my new house has trees, and roses, and a patio, and wisteria, and trumpet vines and bamboo and honeysuckle and pickly pears that are taller than I.
Can you tell I bought the yard, not the house?
On the other hand, I’m sitting here on a Saturday morning shopping for a new fridge, which are not cheap. On the other hand, I get to decide what kind of fridge I want in my life, which is nice.
What we can afford* where we want to live we wouldn’t want to own.
Where we can afford something we would want to own we don’t want to live.
We like the convenience of calling someone when something breaks and they come fix it or call the appropriate person to fix it - at no additional cost to us.
We’ve lived in the same apartment for 7 years, and the landlord really likes us, so we’re paying well below market value. Rental increases have been few and far between, even though the average annual rental increases for this area have been 20-30%, and even though the landlord had our apartment assessed 3 years ago and found out he could get more than twice what we were paying for it . (the apartment below us rents for $800 more than ours and is significantly smaller). We don’t want the additional cost of mortgage payments, even though we could technically afford to pay more than double what we’re paying now.
*Our recent research into the mortgage situation indicates that we could easily be approved for a mortgage more than double what we want to borrow, putting us in the range needed to buy something in our neighborhood. The problem is we don’t feel comfortable buying in this market, and would rather wait. We’re in no hurry.
I bought my home 7 years ago and payed it off in 5 years. It was recently valued at 3 times as much as what I payed for it. The main reason I bought it was because I was sick and tired of renting and putting my hard earned money into someone else’s pocket. It was appealing to have something of my own which had a decent sized yard for my pets. I also wanted to create a nice garden, somewhere I could relax and chill out whenever I wanted and to make renovations whenever I wanted (or could afford). I intend to buy another house some time this year, closer to where I’m about to start a business, so ultimately, buying this house was a good financial investment for me and I’m glad I did it.
SO and I are talking about buying a condo just because we don’t particularly want a yard to upkeep. Neither of us is fond of yard work, but we do want to own at some point in the future to get the equity. When we have kids, we’ll probably get a house with a yard, but a condo for the early years of our marriage is looking better and better.
I have a question – how the heck do you save up a down payment for a house? And what do you do if you have abysmal credit, or a bankruptcy in your past?
For us, a buying even a cheap house feels about as far away as buying Microsoft. Just HOW do you get there from here?
Some of the folks posting here are talking like buying a house is on par with buying a pair of pants.
We planned on buying a condo that’s more like an apartment, so there’d be no yard to deal with. And that’s the one thing that worries me - the resale option on a condo. We might be better off getting a townhouse with only a miniscule yard - I think the resale options are better on thise.
When my husband and I got married we took all the money we got for the wedding and started a house account. (It was about 1500)
We drove older cars with no car payments and spent the first year of our living together paying off all our credit cards. We discovered then that all of my paycheck could then go into savings. So we lived that way on one check for a year.
When we went for our mortgage we got some first time homebuying assistance. They offer everything from no downpayment to rolling closing costs into the loan.
Our first house was a two family so the rent helped with the mortgage. We sold that (ugh capital gains taxes - yeah I know but I didn’t want to be an absentee landlord 2 hours away when the pipes burst at 2am!!!) and were able to buy a house in the area we wanted to live originally but couldn’t afford in the beginning.
If renting was smarter than buying, there would be no landlords.
Property is the best investment available to the average person today.
Mortgage payment on house - $900.00
Replace broken refrigerater- $900.00
Dishwasher replacement- $600.00
Coming in from a night of drinking, putting “Physical Graffiti” on the cd player and cranking it till the roof shakes and sing along with it till you feel like your lungs will explode- Priceless.
First, how are you defining “city of Seattle”? Queen Anne? Greenlake? Bellevue? Some friends of ours bought a house near Greenlake about a year ago, for around $200K. I don’t think they are paying more per month than they would have done renting. (Granted, their house is about the size of a large apartment too, but if you’ve been in an apt for 10 years it would probably fit the stuff you have.) Finances don’t really need to be an issue preventing you from buying.
However …
… if you really would rather not deal with house and yard upkeep, then owning a house is probably not for you. Sure, there’s all the fun that goes into home improvement, like adding the new deck that you really want, and being able to do whatever you like with the rooms and yard. But you will also have to deal with the maintenance, like repairing/replacing the dishwasher when it starts leaking, judging whether the leaky roof can last one more winter, building the fence to keep the neighbor dog from pooping on your lawn.
Have you considered renting a house for a year? It would give you an idea of what kind of maintenance you would be getting yourself in for (even if you are ultimately asking your landlord to come take care of it.) You could probably sublet your current place while you were in the house if you didn’t want to risk giving it up.
We nearly lost our house last year, but managed to recover financially. I was freaked, because in my mind if all I accomplish for my retirement is home ownership I will be minimally satisfied. There are two kinds of working stiff pensioners, those that own their own home and those that don’t and they both get the same old age security cheques each month.
Well, for one thing, I don’t know about other areas, but up here you can get more “bang for your buck”. A bigger place and smaller payments than rent would be for an equivalent living space.
And the aforementioned tax breaks, you get to do what you want, you don’t have to worry about paying security deposits and pet deposits etc etc.
To Tanookie don’t laugh, my bf paid almost 900 (course that could be because things always cost more in AK) for his. You can put in dishes with the gunkiest dried on stuff and it gets everything. Never have to wash dishes before you wash dishes.
I lived in an apartment up until last year. For $820 I got a tiny one bedroom apartment with 10 year old fraying carpet, incorrectly installed linoleum, lovely grey paint, a rusty stove, a dryer that only took 3 cycles to dry one dish towel, and a deck I couldn’t sit on due to a coating of grime coming from the highway.
Added benefits:
2 Beagles braying on the deck below me from 6am until jackass got home at night. Saturday and Sunday included. I used to dump cherry Kool-Aid on them to get them to shut up - too busy licking sugar off themselves to bark, plus added benefit of jackass coming home to sticky dogs. He got evicted eventually and we all had a party.
Neighbor beside me with klaxon like alarm clock that he would forget to turn off on the weekends - he was almost always away on weekends. :mad:
People who don’t understand that bass carries through paper thin walls - especially late at night on a workday.
Oh, and the break-ins. Every year like clockwork, there would be a rash of car break-ins. One year they stole the wheels off our new Jeep and left it sitting on 2 cinderblocks - so concientious. :rolleyes: We got it alarmed the next day and they left it alone the next 4 years - with the same style of wheels they couldn’t resist the first time.
And this was a decent neighborhood. Every once in awhile all the bad neighbors would move out and there would be peace and quiet - but not often.
You couldn’t pry me away from my house. No way.
I’m being pretty literal with the definition – I’m not super picky about the neighborhood, but I don’t really want to go to the suburbs, either. Queen Anne would be a pipe dream – I think their dollhouses go for $100k or so.
Right now, we pay $720/month for a 975-square-foot 1br apartment in Wallingford. I haven’t yet figured out what house we could get that would be less expensive per month. I’m sure it’s not impossible – I haven’t put a lot of effort into massive househunting – but it’s not going to be easy, either.
After reading the thread, though. I’m starting to wonder if I should go buy some cheap house in Renton or somewhere (closer to where I work, for now) and plan on selling it in 5 years. On the other hand, we really need to chop down some major credit card debt, so I don’t forsee moving into any more expensive option (bigger apartment or house) until that’s taken out of the way. We’re working on it, but it’ll probably be another year or so.
See, I really, really hate yardwork. I did it when I was a kid, and I grew to like it less and less as I got older. And home improvement doesn’t appeal to me much more than that, frankly. I would definitely pay people to add a deck, rather than build the deck myself, for example. Not because I couldn’t figure out how to do it, but because I’m just not interested.
Working on the interior – that would be more fun. I wouldn’t mind painting. But god, I hate mowing lawns . . .
I, too, despise mowing lawns. Every time I think about looking at getting a house, my brain says “You’ll have to get a lawnmower and we all know what THAT means!” That’s why I put him in charge, he’s the smart one.
I’ve been fortunate, in that my neighbours have always been fairly good-- and the landlords are willing to kick out bad neighbours.
I’ve also had landlords who do major repairs on the day of the complaint (like when I mentioned that I had some water under my sink-- turned out the previous plumber had screwed up attaching the water main coming to my faucet, and the thing was in danger of blowing-- and flooding the 9 floors below me).
Not to mention the down payment. In my neck of the woods, I’d need at least a $20, 000 down payment to buy a condo on the 4th floor of a highrise-- and the damn thing wouldn’t even exist anywhere except in the architect’s head for 18 months-- so I’m paying rent and a mortgage at the same time until I can move into a place that’s almost guaranteed to leak after 5 years.
A detached house? Starting prices are now around $500,000 for a 40-year-old bungalow half an hour outside the downtown core. I’d go for a rowhouse, but they don’t exist…
Some banks give first-time buyers a break with the downpayment. As a first-time buyer, Bank of America granted me an $82,000 mortgage with $5000 down. They also allowed a third party to pay the bulk of the five grand; I paid $500 out of my pocket and the rest was graciously donated by one of my sisters.
Check with your local governement as well. I missed out on an opportunity to negate my closing costs and possibly a further downpayment reduction because I was not aware of a special program for first-time buyers in Arlington County.
